Oral Answers to Questions

WORK AND PENSIONS

The Secretary of State was asked—

Child Benefit

Andrew MacKinlay: If he will make a statement on planned improvements to child benefit and its delivery.

Andrew Smith: This Government have shown their commitment to universal child benefit as the foundation of their support for children, with record increases and child benefit for the first child up by #4.70 a week—a 25 per cent. real-terms increase. From April, the Child Benefit Agency will transfer to the Inland Revenue, so families will receive Government financial support for their children from a single Department.

Andrew MacKinlay: Bearing in mind that hundreds and thousands of mothers who are currently recipients of child benefit will also be beneficiaries of the new child tax credit, is it not possible that all the money could be paid in one lump sum through the payroll taxation system? Will not many people who currently receive child benefit be confused by the similar names of the benefits and not understand what they will soon be entitled to receive through the child tax credit?

Andrew Smith: I take my hon. Friend's point, but I would have thought that most parents, and mothers in particular, would like to know what they are getting in child benefit as well as what they are getting in child tax credit. The key issue is how much better off they will be as a consequence both of the increase in child benefits and the introduction of the new child tax credit.

Archy Kirkwood: I acknowledge that the Government have done much to increase the volumes of money that are paid through child benefit, which is welcome. The Secretary of State mentioned that a major transformation is coming in April, when the child benefit centre goes to the Inland Revenue. Is he not concerned that the decision-making report that he made to the House last July indicated that some 57 per cent. of child benefit calculations for decisions against which appeals could be made were accurate? That means that 43 per cent. were inaccurate. Surely, that needs to be sorted out before the transfer is effected in April.

Andrew Smith: I share the hon. Gentleman's concerns about that issue and note his comments. Work is being undertaken by the Child Benefit Agency specifically to improve its performance. I am pleased to say that its performance has been improving in many respects and I am confident that it is well placed to make the transfer to the Inland Revenue satisfactorily.

Means-tested Benefits

Peter Viggers: What proportion of pensioners are eligible for means-tested benefits.

Ian McCartney: Good afternoon, Mr. Speaker.
	About one third of pensioner benefit units have been in receipt of income-related benefits over the past five years. We want all pensioners to have a decent and secure income in retirement. Our first priority was to help the poorest, which is why we introduced the minimum income guarantee. As a result, no pensioner has to live on less than #98.15 a week or #149.80 for a couple. From April this year, the level will be #102.10 for a single person or #155.80 a week for a couple.

Peter Viggers: The Chancellor of the Exchequer once memorably told the Labour party conference that he wanted to end the scourge, as he called it, of means-testing pensioners. Of course, this Government have done exactly the opposite, and by April about 60 per cent. of pensioners will be means-tested. Has the situation developed to such an extent, undermining people's independence, as a result of a sequence of incompetences and serious blunders, or, as I suspect, because of a cynical and deliberate intention by this socialist Government to undermine people's independence and increase their dependency?

Ian McCartney: Christmas has come early; that is a second present for me. The hon. Gentleman accused me of being a socialist. I plead guilty.
	It is bit rich to hear Opposition Members talking about means-testing. This Government are not means-testing; we are targeting poverty, not pensioners—[Hon. Members: XAh!"] Hon. Gentlemen should listen for just a second. We are ending the weekly means test. Those aged 65-plus will need to report major life events. Instead of a weekly means test, financial circumstances over a period of five years will need to be reported. We are abolishing the upper capital limits of #12,000 and #16,000 for people in residential care and waits for hospital operations are down from 13 to six weeks. On calculations relating to personal injury awards, notional earnings for unpaid work, charitable donations, credit or insurance and disability allowances, this Government are getting rid of the means-testing created by the previous Tory Government.

Lynne Jones: The Secretary of State is on record as describing the pension system as an incomprehensible maze. Does my right hon. Friend accept that part of the incomprehensibility is due to the increase in means-testing in the system for helping pensioners, and that the Green Paper deals with the complexity of only the private pension scheme? As one socialist to another, I ask him whether the Government will examine more closely the relationship between private pensions and the basic and secondary systems that the state provides to simplify that incomprehensible maze.

Ian McCartney: I thank my hon. Friend for her question. In the Green Paper and through modernising the public pension system, the Government are simplifying the system. The amount of money that we spend on pensioners' income, not bureaucracy, is growing. The pension credit alone means an additional #2 billion a year to tackle pensioner poverty. I make no apology for doing that.

Steve Webb: In order to evaluate the Government's strategy of mass means-testing for pensioners, we need information on the number of pensioners who are entitled to means-tested benefits but do not claim them. The last figures show that hundreds of thousands of the poorest pensioners were missing out, but they relate to the previous century. When will we get figures for this century? Is the delay due to incompetence or a more sinister reason?

Ian McCartney: In this House, the hon. Gentleman has from time to time tried to put pensioners off claiming their entitlements, whether the minimum income guarantee, winter fuel payments or the pension credit. Instead of dancing on a pinhead about uptake, he should say whether Liberal Democrats support the introduction of the pension credit, which means an extra #2 billion a year for pensioners. He can either support that or continue his campaign of denigration and put pensioners off claiming their rights.

Kelvin Hopkins: There can be no doubt that pensioners are better off under the Labour Government than under the Conservative Government. Indeed, the Conservative Government broke the link between pensions and earnings. However, does my right hon. Friend agree that the next logical step forward to overcome the problems of means-testing and take-up is converting the minimum income guarantee into the state pension? That would automatically link pensions with earnings again and overcome the problems of means-testing.

Ian McCartney: My hon. Friend's proposal would mean an additional #10 a week for all pensioners, but a reduction of #17 a week for the poorest pensioners. We want real distribution of resources, which means tackling poverty. If we want to do that, we must put our resources where they are required for pensioners who do not get a decent income.

James Arbuthnot: Does the Minister accept that if he does not do what the hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) suggested, the minimum income guarantee and pension credit will act as a serious disincentive to save for those who are on average and lower incomes? Will not that ultimately mean more rather than less means-testing under the Government?

Ian McCartney: This is the first time in history that a Government are rewarding savings through the pension credit. The Conservative party opposes the minimum income guarantee and winter fuel payments and wants to privatise the basic state pension. That lies behind the right hon. Gentleman's question. It is time that Conservative Members told the British public what they are up to with pensions. While the right hon. Gentleman tries to hide that, we shall get on with eradicating pensioner poverty.

David Winnick: Does my right hon. Friend remember that however cold the winter months became before 1997, pensioners did not receive a penny, and that since we have been in office, the #200 per pensioner household has been a good socialist move? Why did not the Tories do that? Why were they so mean that they deprived pensioners? [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. The Minister does not need to answer that.

Oliver Heald: When the Chancellor spoke of getting rid of means-testing, did he mean, as the Minister suggested, simply renaming it as Xtargeting"? Is not it time that the Government accepted that they have increased the number of people who do not claim the benefits to which they are entitled? Millions of people live on 30 per cent. less than what the Government consider appropriate. It is estimated that 1 million people will not claim the pension credit, even by 2006, according to the Government's figures. All those involved with pensions are devising proposals to restructure the basic pension system so that people receive a larger state pension, yet the Government complacently sit on their hands. They simply twiddle and produce a Green Paper that recycles old information, which we have heard time and again. Is not it time that the Government did something to help poor pensioners?

Ian McCartney: The hon. Gentleman should calm down. I can answer the point about 1 million people not claiming the pension credit—that policy has not yet been implemented. The hon. Gentleman should ask a sensible question. The one organisation that brutalised pensioners is the Conservative party. The Government inherited a legacy of pensioner poverty and are eradicating it.

Economically Inactive

Wayne David: What measures he has taken to encourage into work those in the most deprived communities who are counted as economically inactive.

Nick Brown: Our active labour market policies are helping people to move from welfare to work in all parts of the country, and tax credits are making sure that that work pays. The new deals have already helped three quarters of a million people into jobs, and jobcentres are notified of more than 10,000 new vacancies every working day. Moreover, in the most employment-deprived areas of the country we have introduced specific initiatives such as action teams for jobs.The action team working in my hon. Friend's constituency has so far helped 275 people into jobs.

Wayne David: I know the Minister will agree that this is a huge issue. In some parts of the south Wales valleys, as many as one in four of the working-age population are categorised as economically inactive. Does my right hon. Friend also agree that it is necessary to improve the health and well-being of many in our poorest communities, and that healthy living programmes must be a vital part of our ongoing strategy?

Nick Brown: I do agree; I represent a constituency with similar problems. We must consider people on Xinactive" benefits who might be able to do some work if the opportunities and the encouragement were there, and work with the national health service to establish rehabilitation programmes. That, indeed, is the thrust of the Green Paper on which we are now consulting.

Sydney Chapman: The Minister will know that there are now 4 million income support claimants, more than there were when the Government came to power. He will also know that the number of incapacity benefit claimants is back to the 1997 level. Of the lone parents who were promised—if that is the right word—mandatory interviews enabling them to seek employment, only 14 per cent. have been given such interviews. What has gone wrong?

Nick Brown: The problem arose, of course, under the Conservative Government, when the number of people receiving incapacity benefit and its predecessor trebled. It was, indeed, the unstated policy of the Conservative party to move people from unemployment benefit on to the inactive benefits, because unemployment was at its peak: some 3 million people a year were becoming unemployed.
	We must see what we can do to return to work people receiving inactive benefits who would like to work and who could do something. That means working with the NHS and others to find pathways back into work. We are consulting on precisely those matters by way of the Green Paper.

Linda Gilroy: My right hon. Friend will know from his several visits to Plymouth of the spectacularly successful work done by the employment action zone and the Employment Service in tackling unemployment there. How will the partnerships be helped through the operation of employment action zones after October this year to help the Xhardest to help" back to work?

Nick Brown: Those matters are under review. The Government's core policy is, of course, the roll-out of Jobcentre Plus. I have just written to Members describing the programme, and there is a copy of that letter in the Library. The future of the employment zone model is under consideration, but the Government will want to continue the partnership work that underpins it.

Incapacity Benefit

James Gray: What targets his Department has for getting people who claim incapacity benefit into work.

Andrew Smith: None in that form. Our target is to increase the employment rate of disabled people, and to reduce the gap between their rate of employment and the overall employment rate. The proposals in our Green Paper XPathways to Work" aim to help more people in receipt of incapacity benefit move into jobs.

James Gray: The Government may have no targets now, but when they launched the new deal for disabled people their target was to return 90,000 disabled people to jobs within three years. However, Disability Now magazine—which I am sure the Minister respects as much as I do—tells me that the current figure is not 90,000 but 1,400. Why is that?

Andrew Smith: If I recall correctly, 8,000 people have moved into jobs through the new deal for disabled people. We need to do more in terms of our overall policy, but we are making good progress on the employment rates of disabled people.
	The employment rate for disabled people rose by 4.5 per cent. between 1998 and 2002, and the difference between the disabled and the overall employment rate has fallen by 3 per cent., so the gap is being narrowed. Of course we want to do more—for example, by acting against discrimination against disabled people through building on the experience of the new deal and through the new pilots that we are launching later this year.

Jonathan R Shaw: I recently visited the social security office that provides services for my constituency. The staff there embraced and welcomed the new Jobcentre Plus approach. They are on the third phase, but there was a concern that those on the final stages of the roll-out of the new programme will not necessarily get the benefits that those involved in the pilot programme will receive. Will my right hon. Friend assure me that those at the end of the programme will be as well furbished and established in our constituencies as those who are at the beginning?

Andrew Smith: Yes, indeed. The whole object, as we develop new programmes and pilot new initiatives, is to learn from experience so that we can ensure that the service improves—for example, through the programme support and personal advisory support that is available, and which, reports tell me, is greatly appreciated by clients of our services.

Tim Boswell: I am sure that the Secretary of State and, in this respect at least, the whole House may wish to agree with the Prime Minister, who said in a speech last year that it was Xa scandal" that 2.7 million people on incapacity or other disability benefits are
	Xwritten off, left to drift into long-term incapacity and unemployment". After the Conservatives introduced changes in 1995, the incapacity benefit count fell inexorably for five years. Is it not, therefore, genuinely disturbing that, under Labour, it has now bounced back to above the level at which it started, and that the trend, despite the Prime Minister's remarks, is resolutely upwards? When can we have slightly less consultation from the Secretary of State—be it pathways to work, or whatever—and slightly more effective action to tackle this scandal?

Andrew Smith: We have already had action, which is why the annual inflow on to incapacity benefit fell by one quarter between 1997 and last year, from 840,000 a year to 640,000. That compares with an inflow rate of 940,000 a year when the Conservatives were in government. Of course we want and need to do more to help people on incapacity benefit who want to work, and are able to work, to get into jobs. Some 150,000 a year move into work at the moment, and I would have hoped that there would be support from the Conservative Front Bench and, indeed, from all hon. Members, for helping still more disabled people to fulfil their potential through work.

Antisocial Behaviour

James Plaskitt: What plans he has to link housing benefit penalties to antisocial behaviour.

Malcolm Wicks: The inclusion of an antisocial behaviour Bill in our legislative programme underlines the Government's determination to tackle this problem, which blights the lives of so many of our constituents. We shall include in that Bill whatever measures will act as a real deterrent. We are considering a range of options, including housing benefit sanctions.

James Plaskitt: I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that nuisance neighbour problems can be some of the hardest that we have to deal with in our constituencies. Constituents can become really frustrated at the inability of housing authorities or the police to take the action necessary to fix the problem. Does my hon. Friend agree that their frustration can be further aggravated by the knowledge that, in some cases, the law-abiding innocent neighbour may be subsidising the rent of the nuisance neighbour through their taxes?

Malcolm Wicks: I certainly understand that frustration. There was widespread support in the House for the Bill introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), and it was our job in the Government to try to make that a workable and legal Bill. It would have been on the statute book now but for the successful filibuster by the Liberal Democrats, who will have to account to their electorates for their behaviour.

Bob Spink: Does the Minister consider it to be antisocial behaviour for a council not properly to deal with housing benefit claims from constituents who are vulnerable and need help? What action would he propose taking against a council that has been found by the Audit Commission to be failing in payment of housing benefit?

Malcolm Wicks: We are taking a wide range of measures and action to improve housing benefit administration. We have a performance framework and extra funding for local authorities, and housing benefit performance is increasing, but I recognise that there are problems in some local authorities. We are tackling them as fast as we can.

Frank Field: As the Government kindly took over the Housing Benefit (Withholding of Payment) Bill—and rewrote every clause and every word in it, including the long title—what would be the Minister's response if, after the support that No. 10 has provided, its provisions do not appear in the antisocial behaviour legislation that the Government are to introduce later this year?

Malcolm Wicks: To use my right hon. Friend's phrase, we took over the Bill simply to make it legal and workable, and he must forgive us for that. The serious point is that there is a range of ways to tackle antisocial behaviour. The Police Reform Act 2002 introduced changes that will strengthen antisocial behaviour orders, because we know that too few have been enacted. Also, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's consultation paper, XTackling Anti-Social Tenants", includes a range of ideas about tenancy agreements and the rest. Those and my right hon. Friend's ideas are ones that we are considering actively in terms of the antisocial behaviour Bill that will be brought before the House.

Julian Brazier: Concern about such disgusting behaviour extends to all parts of the House, and I am sure that all Members present have had brought to their surgeries, as I have, harrowing cases involving frightened or terrified people—pensioners, young families and others—some of whom have even been driven from their homes. The Minister has rightly drawn attention to the shameful role of the Liberal Democrats in talking out the measure. When will he be able to tell his hon. Friends whether the proposal is to be enacted this year?

Malcolm Wicks: We all recognised during the deliberations on the Bill introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead that, at best, it would be a minor weapon in the armoury and that antisocial behaviour orders—this we stated at the time—and tenancy agreements were the stronger. I can only repeat that we are considering all those ideas, and our proposals will come forward with the Bill in due course.

Benefits (Poverty Threshold)

Brian Jenkins: What his targets are for reducing the number of households that receive benefits and which are below the poverty threshold.

Malcolm Wicks: On 18 September 2002, we published a new edition of XOpportunity for All", which provides a detailed account of our strategy for tackling poverty and social exclusion as well as the range of indicators and targets against which we measure progress. The report shows that we have achieved a great deal and that our approach is working. We will continue to deliver on that challenge over the years to come.

Brian Jenkins: I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. We are all aware that work is the only way out of poverty for many and that we are encouraging people in areas where the number of vacancies is greater than the number of jobless to take a role, but what is he doing to protect the vulnerable innocent—the children—who all too often live in households where income falls below that which we deem necessary?

Malcolm Wicks: We all recognise that over, perhaps, the past 30 years, due to economic as well as social and family factors, poverty in this country began to wear a younger face—child poverty increased significantly. Back in 1996–97, one third of children lived in low-income households. I am pleased to say that, compared with 1997, there are about half a million fewer children in low-income households, based on a relative measure. Given the real increase in incomes, and therefore the moving target that we face, that is a real improvement in tackling relative poverty as it affects too many of our children.

Patrick Cormack: In the words of the question, what are the Minister's targets? Has he achieved them, or is he going to?

Malcolm Wicks: The Government have a strong ambition to eradicate child poverty—[Interruption.] If the House will listen, we also have a public service agreement to reduce child poverty by a third. So far, we have gone a third of a way in a third of the time towards achieving that target.

David Cairns: Thirty-nine per cent. of people of working age in my constituency are economically inactive, and we have the third poorest average wage rates in the whole of Scotland. Will my hon. Friend therefore consider urging his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to site one of the six new pilot schemes giving people on incapacity benefit extra help to get into work in my constituency, as that will go some way towards tackling one of the most serious causes of poverty households?

Malcolm Wicks: I am afraid that the decision on the pilots has not yet been made, but I am sure that my colleagues have heard my hon. Friend's genuine concern. We all recognise that incapacity issues are some of the most taxing facing our society, and our recent document shows our determination to tackle those issues effectively.

Hywel Williams: Work is the best way out of poverty. However, the rate of economic activity in Wales is much lower than in the south-east of England—61.3 per cent. in early 2000 for people over 50 compared with 76.8 per cent. in the south-east. Can the Minister assure us that that gap is being closed?

Malcolm Wicks: We are conscious of regional and local variations in unemployment. So far, the success is that some 75 per cent. of people of working age in Britain are in jobs, which puts us more or less at the top of the European league table—only two smaller countries have a slightly better record. We are not complacent, however, and now realise that our understanding of the causes of unemployment has to be more detailed and specific if we are successfully to tackle them and the issues raised by the hon. Gentleman.

Bill O'Brien: My hon. Friend is correct to draw attention to the action taken by his Department to eradicate child poverty. However, will he explain what he intends to do to ensure that the Child Support Agency, which is not collecting maintenance so some families are driven into greater poverty, becomes more efficient and provides maintenance for the 30 per cent. of children who are losing out at present?

Malcolm Wicks: Certainly, I alluded earlier to family changes that have affected Britain and the fact that many of our children are now growing up in one-parent, rather than two-parent families. That is a major contemporary cause of poverty, hence the introduction of the Child Support Agency, whose performance is improving year by year. We have, of course, introduced proposals for reform. When we are in a position to implement them after thoroughly testing the system and after my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is able come to the House with dates, they will further improve the situation. With a simpler formula, our colleagues in the CSA will be able to spend more time on enforcement, which is a major step in the right direction.

Pensions Funding

John Bercow: If he will make a statement on the Government's policy towards the minimum funding requirement for pensions.

Maria Eagle: Our Green Paper on working and saving for retirement sets out proposals for replacing the minimum funding requirement with scheme-specific requirements that will allow schemes to chose investment strategies more appropriate for their own particular circumstances.

John Bercow: I am grateful to the Minister for her helpful reply. Given the widespread and justified concern about companies which, in choosing to wind up their final salary schemes, universally renege on their pensions obligations to their staff, can the hon. Lady tell the House and me whether, under the new arrangements, companies will be better or worse placed than under preceding arrangements to keep their pension promises to their employees?

Maria Eagle: First, I welcome the hon. Gentleman to the Back Benches—the last time that we jousted in the House he was in a different place. Since he moved, I have found that I agree with more and more of what he says. For example, I agreed with him the other morning when he said on television that the Tory party's chances of winning the next election are about as great as finding an Eskimo in the desert.
	I have a lot of sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman has just said—he is referring more than anything else to the Maersk situation. Certainly, what that company has done is currently lawful, although we would probably both agree that it is pretty disreputable behaviour by any standards. The Green Paper includes proposals to share out scheme assets more fairly on wind-up and to strengthen protection for members of pension schemes caught in such situations. Pension provision will work into the future only if all parties can trust other parties to keep their pension promises. I look forward to hearing my hon. Friend's response, and perhaps that of some of his constituents, to the consultation on the Green Paper.

Bill Olner: My hon. Friend will know that the trade union movement has made specific demands for the Government to protect workers' pensions. Far too many companies have got away with pension holidays and are now reneging on final salary payments. It really is time for the Government to get tough on employers who scandalously expose their workers to poverty when they retire.

Maria Eagle: I strongly agree. My hon. Friend will have noted that the Green Paper contains proposals for stiffening the obligations on companies to consult their employees and unions before making unilateral changes to their schemes. Unfortunately, the current minimum funding requirement did not provide the level of security that many thought it might, and that is why there is widespread agreement in the industry and across the field that we are right to be considering changes to the MFR. One of the difficulties is that it has led to short-term decision making and inflexibility. In a time of fluctuating stock markets, to say the least, short-term decisions are not necessarily the best thing for pensions, which are of course a long-term business.

David Heath: Does the Minister agree that, when one considers the whole spectrum of investments, including pensions, split funds and life insurance, one can see, without wanting to appear too alarmist, that there is a real risk of people losing confidence in all financial instruments. Is it not therefore incumbent on the Government to apply their mind to the problem with rather more urgency than is suggested by a Green Paper process, which may mean that effective remedy is years and years away?

Maria Eagle: We have to strike a balance between responding urgently to daily headlines and situations that change very quickly and bearing in mind the fact that pensions are a long-term business. We will not get the best framework for private pensions saving over the long term if we react daily and make changes that deal only with issues that are in the headlines. We will not ensure that people save enough in private pensions for their retirement if we do not have the right framework in the long run, so the most important thing is, with as much consensus as possible in the House and across the industry, among employees and employers, to get the right system in place to provide the protection and balance that will enable people to save appropriately for their retirement.

Action Teams for Jobs

John Lyons: If he will make a statement about the effectiveness of action teams for jobs.

Nick Brown: Action teams are performing well, so far helping over 57,000 jobless people in the country's most deprived areas to move into work. An evaluation study of the first year of the initiative found that 80 per cent. of people who found work through action teams moved into sustained jobs.

John Lyons: In parallel with the work of the action teams there are some outstanding local developments and initiatives that are trying to deal with some of the long-term unemployment problems in rural and semi-rural areas. Will my right hon. Friend ensure that we continue to encourage such initiatives so that we can really tackle the problems?

Nick Brown: I strongly agree. We have to provide a whole range of modern, labour market-oriented services to sparsely populated communities. The Department takes its outreach work very seriously. We are considering initiatives such as mobile centres to give advice on jobs that are available, and indeed on benefits.

Michael Fabricant: But does the Minister believe that the 1 per cent. employment tax starting in April will improve job opportunities?

Nick Brown: The public services have to be funded.

Stephen Ladyman: Action teams for jobs have been a great success in my constituency, and there are some wonderful examples of how that initiative has got people back into work. However, does my right hon. Friend accept that its effectiveness is limited in part because it is targeted on priority wards, rather than being provided for the whole district? Can he understand how frustrating it is for somebody to discover that they might be denied help from an action team simply because they live on the wrong side of a road?

Nick Brown: My understanding is that the action teams are not too prescriptive about this, but I do appreciate the point that my hon. Friend makes. Nevertheless, I think it right that scarce public resources be targeted where the need is greatest, and I do not think that such projects would be helped by the #20 billion cut in public expenditure that we understand is on offer from the Opposition.

Minimum Income Guarantee

Andrew Selous: What level of savings fund is necessary for a person not to qualify for the minimum income guarantee.

Ian McCartney: The level of pension savings needed for a person not to qualify for the minimum income guarantee will depend on the level of entitlement to state pension benefits that has been built up over individuals' working lives. The introduction of the pension credit ends the unfair, absolute penalty on savings, thus encouraging people to provide for their own retirement. The existing capital cliff edge will disappear, so those with savings of more than #12,000 will no longer be automatically excluded from help.

Andrew Selous: Is the Minister aware that a pensioner couple in receipt of both housing benefit and council tax benefit need a fund of #142,000 in order not to be subject to means-tested benefits? Does he not agree that letting pensioners keep 100 per cent. of their savings and giving them a higher basic state pension as of right would be the most effective ways to assist saving among the poorest of the population?

Ian McCartney: I wonder how the hon. Gentleman squares that view with the intention, expressed by Opposition Front Benchers, of cutting public expenditure by 20 per cent., some of which would fall on the poorest pensioners. His party is against the minimum income guarantee, the pension credit and winter fuel payments. The fact is that this is the first Government in history, through the pension credit, to give people the incentive to save—unlike the previous Conservative Government, who imposed a 100 per cent. marginal tax rate on savings, thus forcing many pensioners into poverty.

George Mudie: Can the Minister confirm that since 1997, the minimum income guarantee has led to a real-terms increase in the pensions of the poorest pensioners of 37 per cent., taken 1.1 million pensioners out of absolute poverty, and provided an average additional sum of #30 per week for the poorest pensioners? However, can he also confirm that this is the same MIG as the Leader of the Opposition described as having nothing to recommend it?

Mr. Speaker: Order. That was two questions: the Minister should answer the first one, not the second.

Ian McCartney: That was always my intention, Mr. Speaker—although perhaps I should ask my hon. Friend to repeat it, as I cannot remember it. [Laughter.] He is absolutely right, and perhaps the most important point to make is that, hopefully, hon. Members on both sides of the House will come together from April of this year and adopt a bipartisan approach to securing the successful implementation of the pension credit. It will provide more than #2 billion in the way of additional income for the poorest pensioners and, for the first time, for those who suffered under the previous Conservative Government, when they saved a little and lost a lot.

Peter Lilley: Can the Minister confirm that under the pension credit, which will affect the majority of pensioners, any pensioner will keep only 60p of every extra pound of pension income that they save?

Ian McCartney: When the right hon. Gentleman was Secretary of State, pensioners got nothing: for every pound saved, they lost a pound. He gave with one hand, and took with the other.

Peter Lilley: indicated dissent.

Ian McCartney: Perhaps I should start again. The right hon. Gentleman owes this House and our country an apology for the way he managed this Department as Secretary of State. He introduced rules that meant that for every pound a pensioner saved, their entitlement was reduced by a further pound. The pension credit has at last put right the mistakes that he made.

Pension Yields

Julian Lewis: What his estimate is of trends in average pension yields over the next decade.

Maria Eagle: The Government do not make an official estimate of future investment returns. Over the past 10 years, overall pension investment returns have been 7.5 per cent., and private sector estimates suggest that they will be around 7 to 8 per cent. over the next 10 years.
	What is clear is that people need to put sufficient aside for their retirement and regularly monitor their level of saving. Many of the proposals in our recent Green Paper XSimplicity, Security and Choice" will help them do this.

Julian Lewis: It is surprising—is it not?—that one can have an answer to a question like that without any mention of the #5 billion a year taken from pension funds by the Government since they abolished the tax credit on dividends in 1997. The Under-Secretary was waxing eloquent about the iniquity of firms in closing final salary schemes, but does she accept that the Government's pensions raid has little to do with those firms doing what they have done? They could have absorbed it, they should have absorbed it, but if the Government had not taken that action, the problem might not have arisen.

Maria Eagle: No, I do not accept that. The Conservative party is for ever talking about the #5 billion without mentioning the offsetting corporation tax cuts, for a start. As is well known in the House, throughout the industry and by anybody who considers these issues, many factors have led to some of the problems in respect of defined benefit schemes and their closures, not least the stock market falls that have been taking place over the past couple of years.

Kevin Brennan: I know that my hon. Friend is aware that the pension yield for ex-Allied Steel and Wire workers from Cardiff over the next 10 years may be as low, according to some predictions, as 16 per cent. of the pension they expected on retirement. I know that she will want to join me in welcoming last week's announcement that Celsa is reopening the steel plant in Cardiff, which will save many hundreds of jobs. Will she also agree to look at the plight of those workers who lost their pension as a result of losing their jobs at a time when the pension fund was at a low ebb?

Maria Eagle: Yes, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Pensions has met some of the workers affected in this particular case. Much of the Green Paper deals with issues that have been raised by right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House in respect of those who work and save into occupational pensions and whose legitimate expectations are not met. We must get right the changes that will arise following the consultation on the Green Paper. If we do not, it is much less likely that people will be confident enough to save into occupational pensions the amount of money that they need to ensure a secure retirement.

Vincent Cable: Does the Minister agree that the fall in pension yields has been particularly serious for annuitants? As the Government have held at bay the amounts for compulsion in other elements of pension policy, why do they cling to compulsion in this area rather than allowing pensioners to make their own investment decisions?

Maria Eagle: The hon. Gentleman will be aware that annuities are the only way of securing an income for the lifetime of a person who has saved, and of course we all celebrate the fact that people are living longer. That is what pensions are for, and that is why annuities are important. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman and his party will be responding in full to the Green Paper consultation, and I look forward to seeing what they have to say.

Retirement Savings

Hugh Robertson: If he will make a statement about the rate of saving for retirement in the United Kingdom.

Andrew Smith: As set out in the pensions Green Paper, we believe that as people are living longer and want good standards of living in retirement, they need as a whole either to save more, to work longer, or a mix of both. That is why we are consulting on a range of measures to improve simplicity, security and choice in pension saving as well as making it easier for people to carry on working longer when they want to.

Hugh Robertson: In view of the problems of last year's Office for National Statistic figures, is the Secretary of State convinced that people are now saving enough for their retirement? If not, what is he doing to encourage people to save more?

Andrew Smith: I already said in my initial answer that we recognise that if people want good standards of living in retirement, and as people are living longer, they will clearly need to save more, work longer or a mix of both. The ONS conducted a review of the statistics, and I think it wise to treat all pensions statistics with caution until that review has been fully implemented.

Alan Simpson: Is not the greatest sense of insecurity about people's pension contributions to be found in the 40 per cent. devaluation in the value of their pensions that is a result of frittering that away in a gamble on the stock exchange over the past year? If we are to encourage pension contributors to make larger contributions, should we not also consider allowing workers to have a greater choice about the direction in which their savings are going? I refer specifically the prospect of workers being able to choose to have their contributions paid into infrastructure investments, which would provide security of assets, certainty of return and a social dividend on top?

Andrew Smith: The Green Paper's proposals radically to simplify the framework for pensions saving, not least as far as tax treatment is concerned, will increase existing flexibility, which has already been enhanced, not least by the introduction of individual savings accounts.

David Willetts: The Secretary of State has just said that it is wise to treat pension statistics with caution. Why, then, having come to the House last month to claim that our pension contributions had increased by 40 per cent. since 1997, did he use that statistic as justification for the complacency of his Green Paper? I welcome the fact that he has not repeated that statistic today; has he seen sense and abandoned his claim that our pension savings are zooming upwards? If that figure really is so shaky, why did he rest his policy on it last month?

Andrew Smith: There is no complacency about pension savings or the way in which the statistics are assessed. That is why I announced the review on which the ONS has now embarked. That is also why, as I said, it is wise to treat all statistics with caution until the review has been fully implemented. The hon. Gentleman will have noticed that the pension commission that we are establishing as part of the Green Paper process will, as one of its first tasks, undertake a baseline audit of the adequacy of long-term savings for pensions, including the adequacy of the information available.
	As for the figures cited by the hon. Gentleman, I and other Ministers are right, when asked, to report to the House the figures that we are given by the ONS. We should be criticised if we did not give those figures. The figure of 40 per cent. was cleared with the ONS, and I checked it again before Question Time today.

David Willetts: It is always the fault of the Office for National Statistics. The fact is that Ministers used the statistics as the basis for their complacent policy. I do not believe, and have set out my arguments for not doing so in The Times today, that we are saving #46 billion a year, another statistic that the Secretary of State has repeated. The correct figure is #32 billion a year. The Secretary of State is able to claim that we are apparently putting more and more money into our pensions only by counting the extra money that companies must put in to offset the effects of the tax increase. If he were to put another #5 billion a year tax on pensions, and if companies had to put more money into their pensions funds to counteract it, he would claim that we were saving more for our pensions. Does he realise what an absurd position he has got himself into?

Andrew Smith: The hon. Gentleman has been very assiduous on this matter, and I have been happy to come to the House to acknowledge the service that he has provided in questioning the statistics. Indeed, that is the job of the Opposition.
	That said, so far as the hon. Gentleman's claim to be specific about the level of pensions saving is concerned, I treat his statistics with at least as much scepticism as I regard those that come from the ONS.

Redundancies

Tony Cunningham: What plans he has to help people affected by large-scale redundancies to find new work.

Nick Brown: In April 2002, we launched the rapid response service to provide a coherent, tailored response to help people affected by large-scale redundancies. The service provides advice and support to enable people who are made redundant to make the transition into new jobs. By December, the rapid response service had provided support nationally to more than 200 companies and made its services available to more than 67,000 people facing redundancy.

Tony Cunningham: I thank my right hon. Friend for his reply and for his keen interest in my constituency. Does he agree that one problem in constituencies such as mine is that while jobs tend to be lost in the manufacturing sector, the jobs that are created tend to be in the service sector? What is being done to help people who find themselves in those circumstances?

Nick Brown: My hon. Friend is right. The labour market circumstances in west Cumbria are specific to that area. The response led by the local authority in my hon. Friend's constituency is the right one. The authority has brought together all elements in the community to consider areas in which new jobs can be created, to do what they can to assist and to work with the Employment Service, and to offer proactive advice to those who are displaced in the labour market, most of whom, as my hon. Friend said, have been displaced from manufacturing enterprises.

Anne McIntosh: The Minister will be aware that most large-scale redundancies in the Vale of York are in the farming community. Can he confirm that there will be training opportunities for those who have lost their jobs on farms, and that, for example, those who may have been well qualified to drive tractors will be eligible for training to drive light goods vehicles? To whom should such people apply, and could the training eventually be extended to heavy goods vehicles as well, as that is far too expensive for individuals to pay for out of their own pocket?

Nick Brown: I am more than happy to help the hon. Lady's constituents where I can. Of course, I have sympathy for those in farming communities who are displaced. The fact is, however, that employment trends in agriculture are remorseless, long term and very clear. May I write to the hon. Lady on the specifics that she raised? As for where people should apply, it is of course to the nearest jobcentre.

Andy Burnham: I very much echo the concerns raised by my hon. Friend the. Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham) and draw my right hon. Friend the Minister's attention to my constituency, where there were four large-scale manufacturing redundancies in the past year, resulting in 1,000 job losses. Many of the people affected are in their 40s and 50s and have done only that one job throughout their working lives. Although the local jobcentre has provided them with an excellent service, I am aware that few of them have taken up the offer of retraining. Will my right hon. Friend investigate why so few people take up such offers, and will he consider how to improve retraining opportunities for people who are moving from manufacturing to other industries?

Nick Brown: My hon. Friend is right: age is a factor in those considerations. There is a range of options in the Department's armoury and we want to explore all of them, including the possibility of finding similar employment with employers in similar areas of activity. I shall look specifically at the issues that my hon. Friend raised in relation to his constituency and write to him about them.

Child Support Agency

Bob Russell: What progress he has made to check the validity of financial returns to the Child Support Agency by absentee fathers who use the services of accountants or other financial advisers.

Malcolm Wicks: The agency applies the same level of verification to a case, irrespective of whether its client has used a financial adviser.

Bob Russell: May I ask the Minister to reflect on that answer? If an absentee father can afford the services of an accountant or financial adviser to show that he cannot afford to look after his children, there is a strong possibility that somewhere along the line somebody may not be telling the truth. May I suggest that inspections of the lifestyle of some of those absentee fathers, who can afford financial advisers but cannot afford to pay for their children, would be well worth pursuing?

Malcolm Wicks: Since October 1999, the Child Support Agency has been able to share information with the Inland Revenue and to base liability for maintenance on self-assessment returns. It would not make sense for the agency to duplicate the work of the Inland Revenue; if people think that fibs are being told to the Revenue, they should be reported. On the hon. Gentleman's final point, the system allows for what is technically known as a departure to be made where it is absolutely clear that the lifestyle of the non-resident parent, or the absent father, does not seem to be in kilter—if I may put it in that way—with their declared income. Those are difficult cases and depend very much on proving, one way or another, whether the income as reported is correct.

Russell Brown: I concur with the sentiments behind the question put by the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell), but may I point out to my hon. Friend the Minister that there is another side to the equation? What does he think about a situation in which the agency determines that the profits of a self-employed business man, which are aimed for investment in his company, are in fact income that he can use weekly or monthly? Those profits thus count against him.

Malcolm Wicks: The problem—the rub—in cases of family breakdown is that there are two sides to the story. That is the difficulty. If my hon. Friend has a particular case in mind, I shall ask the agency to look into it, but there are clear rules about what does or does not count as income and we try to apply them. I shall be happy to look into the particular case raised by my hon. Friend.

Statutory Retirement Age

Helen Jackson: If he will make a statement on his proposals for changes to the statutory retirement age.

Ian McCartney: There is no state retirement age, only a state pension age—the age from which people can receive their state pension, regardless of whether they have retired or are continuing to work. We have no plans to change that. However, under age legislation, which will be implemented by 2006, compulsory retirement ages are likely to be unlawful unless employers can show they are objectively justified.

Helen Jackson: I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer, but may I suggest to him that men and women in their 60s may start to suffer from a bit of an identity crisis unless there is a little more clarification about the age at which they can start genuinely to feel that they ought to be real pensioners and therefore have access to the great variety of Government benefits that are accessible to pensioners?

Ian McCartney: There are two issues. First, the Government have for the first time launched a pre-retirement guide to help older workers to plan their retirement. [Interruption.] I hope that, instead of boo-hooing, Opposition Members will read the damn thing. Secondly, the big problem in Britain has not been workers being able to work up to retirement age, but discrimination in stopping them doing that. Under the last Conservative Government, people with skills, knowledge and commitment were thrown on the scrap heap when they were as young as 45. This Government will end age discrimination and give people a choice to remain in work, and, if they want to work part-time when they retire, we will give them the choice to do that too.

Points of Order

Tam Dalyell: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Many of our constituents are puzzled—that is somewhat of an understatement and a polite word for it—as to why it was possible for the Ark Royal to set sail, for our troops to go to Kuwait, for the Prime Minister to hold his press conferences and for the press to discuss that endlessly, yet seemingly impossible for the House of Commons to address those very important issues. What does it take in terms of an emergency application to persuade you, Mr. Speaker, that the House of Commons ought to be able to pass judgment on these momentous events?

Glenda Jackson: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. It has been widely advertised that the Prime Minister held a press conference today where the sole topic of questioning was apparently the Government's approach to whether or not there will be a war in Iraq that this country would support. The House has not been afforded the opportunity to question the Prime Minister exclusively for an hour on that issue. Have you received any request from the Prime Minister to afford such an opportunity? If not, what can we do to ask the Prime Minister to attend the House?

Paul Flynn: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Since this matter was discussed last week and had great publicity, I have been approached by many constituents, not a single one of whom believes that going to war is justified and that there is sufficient evidence to show that Saddam Hussein intends to use his weapons of mass destruction. If the possibility of going to war, putting at risk the lives of our constituents and possibly increasing the risk of terrorist attack are not fit subjects for an emergency debate, what on earth is?

Alan Simpson: Further to the point of order raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), will you, Mr. Speaker, give the House some guidance about the circumstances in which war-creep became war without the House having the right, according to a democratic process and in line with the rights of the House, to vote on a substantive motion that endorsed or rejected that proposal?

David Winnick: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it not a fact that, on the very first day that we came back from the recess, the Secretary of State for Defence made a statement and answered questions for quite a long time and that, on the following day, the Prime Minister had a number of questions on this subject? Is it not important that the House should be kept informed, as my hon. Friends have stated, but that it should also be borne in mind that not all of us take the same line and do not accept the Iraqi regime's propaganda about weapons of mass destruction?

Patrick McLoughlin: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. There may be a solution with which you may be able to help the House. The Prime Minister has just given an hour's press conference to the media, which was mainly dictated by the subject of Iraq. I understand from press reports that the Prime Minister is also due to meet something called the parliamentary Labour party this week, and perhaps, Mr. Speaker, you could organise for the television cameras in the relevant Committee Room to be turned on, so that we can all find out exactly what the parliamentary Labour party thinks on this subject. Obviously, that is one way in which the British people may be able to find out exactly what the PLP feels, as we know that the Prime Minister does not like coming to the House of Commons to answer questions too often.

Dennis Skinner: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. This must be the last point of order; I have forgotten what was the first.

Dennis Skinner: I agree with my hon. Friends who have raised this matter, as you probably know, Mr. Speaker, as I have already voted that way. If you allow cameras into Committee Room 14, however, I have news for you: we want the cameras in the 1922 committee, too, and we will cause mayhem.

Mr. Speaker: I am at a disadvantage as far as the parliamentary Labour party is concerned because for two years I have been debarred from attending meetings of the PLP, and that also applies to the 1922 committee. I understand hon. Members' concern. In response to the hon. Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Glenda Jackson), the Prime Minister can be brought to question in the House of Commons at Prime Minister's Question Time. In addition, I understand that, next Wednesday, there will be a defence debate, which will be an opportunity for the House to examine these matters. I reiterate once again that I am guided by the rules of the House, which I have been given. All that I can say at this stage is that I would hope that Ministers would come to make statements at appropriate times, and that hon. Members who wish to catch my eye should make applications for the debate, which is not too far away.

Tam Dalyell: On a last point of order, Mr. Speaker, will the motion on Wednesday week be amendable?

Mr. Speaker: At the moment, it is a debate on the Adjournment.

Tam Dalyell: Does that mean that it is not amendable?

Mr. Speaker: It is a debate on the Adjournment of the House, and it is not amendable.

Opposition Day
	 — 
	[2nd Allotted Day]

Criminal Justice System

Mr. Speaker: Before I call the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman, I inform the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Oliver Letwin: I beg to move,
	That this House views with great concern the rise in gun crime and domestic burglary, the growing demoralisation of the police, the increasing sense of helplessness of the honest citizen and the apparent inability of the Government to provide a coherent, long-term strategy to resolve these problems; and deprecates the Home Secretary's resort to short-term, irrelevant and illiberal measures to conceal this failure.
	As the Home Secretary is well aware—incidentally, I welcome him back to the Green Benches, which is a place that he properly occupies—last night, in Tankersley, not far from his own backyard, there was a dreadful stabbing associated with a dreadful robbery. I wish that I could tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I was naive enough to suppose that the House would be shocked to hear that. Neither the House, nor the country, however, is any longer in a condition to be shocked at the news that such a dreadful event has taken place.
	The Home Office's own figures show that, in the last year, there were some 9,000 reported violent crimes. I am afraid that that is part of a set of statistics that makes dismal reading: we have all become accustomed to such statistics, and we saw them again last week. Robbery—by the Home Office's own account and after its own adjustments—rose by 13 per cent. in the last year. That is on page 10, in table A, of the Home Secretary's own productions. He demurs, but I think that he has some difficulty in refuting what his own office produces. The figure on domestic burglary in the same table, after the same adjustments, shows a 5 per cent. rise. Other kinds of burglary—principally, retail crime—are up 6 per cent., and, by the same token, drug offences are up 12.3 per cent. Furthermore, as the Home Office has spent a great deal of time saying in the last week, gun crime is up—probably by more than the Home Office started by admitting—indeed, it is up dramatically.
	If all that was happening was that we had a sad blip in the reported crime figures and if the underlying truth was that the Government had a well-worked-out strategy for dealing with what has been a long-running problem for this country, I do not suppose that I would have bored you, Mr. Speaker, and the House with this debate. However, the sad fact is that over the past five years the Government have shown no signs of having a coherent long-term strategy for addressing this problem.
	On 16 July 2000, a newspaper produced a leaked and now famous report from Downing street in which the Prime Minister asked for what I believe he described as Xeye-catching initiatives". He has been well served by his Ministers in that regard. We celebrate today—if Xcelebrate" is the right word—a centenary by our account. As far as we can make out, there have been about 100 eye-catching initiatives in criminal justice since the Government came to power. However, I regret to say that they have largely been in response to headlines and show little sign of achievement.
	Twenty-four out of every 25 of the famous antisocial behaviour orders promised by the Prime Minister have not been implemented; instances of benefit docking for the breach of community sentences, which is critical to the Government's current policy—if policy it be—run at 78 a year; child safety orders, another initiative, run at three a year; mandatory seven-year sentences for third-time drug dealers run at one a year; and child curfew orders run at zero a year. Those are the lucky initiatives. Many others have not even started their lives. Benefit docking for truancy has been abandoned; on-the-spot fines at cash tills have been abandoned; and vouchers for good behaviour have been abandoned. I fear that the Government have given us initiative after initiative in response to headline after headline, but the initiatives have often failed and have often never been implemented. There is very little sign of a coherent strategy.
	There are two critical elements to a proper long-term strategy for dealing with crime. The first is to get police on to the streets. I do not believe that there is a great difference of view on that between the Home Secretary and me. We shall soon hear from him, and I have never detected the slightest sign on his part of a reluctance to admit what is evidently the truth. The great difference between this country and the American cities that have cracked crime so well is the fact that they have—and that we do not have—police visible, proactive and effective in numbers on the streets.
	The problem is, therefore, not one of design but of effective delivery. The fact is that we do not have police on our streets. I do not know why the Home Secretary has not been able to get much help from the Chancellor of the Exchequer on that, but I know that the Home Secretary has not helped the matter himself. He has been keeping the police off the streets, and he has been adding to the reasons why they are not on the streets. He has been adding targets, monitoring, standard units, bureaucracy and rules and he has been forcing the police to keep records and to make notes. That is not the way to have them on the streets. Making a report each time someone is stopped is not the way to increase the time spent catching crooks.

Hilton Dawson: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. [Hon. Members: XRight hon. Gentleman."] I apologise. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that he is doing the House and the country a disservice in completely overlooking the role of intelligence-led policing and the way in which police efforts focus on the hard end of crime? Focusing on the activities of criminals is bringing down crime across a whole range of offences to the benefit of communities.

Oliver Letwin: I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman gives me the opportunity to reply. I hope that at some time or another he will do what I have to do on a regular basis and talk to police constables the length and breadth of the country, because he will discover that the flip phrase Xintelligence-led policing" means something on the streets in Britain by its very absence. In the United States, as I have seen for myself, the police know the streets and the residents of them because they patrol up and down. As a result, they gain genuine low-level intelligence day by day and hour by hour. They have real-time information on the compliance status information system—the comstat system—and know where the patterns of crime are developing. That enables them to take the required forces to where the criminals operate. We, however, have to wait minutes, hours or days before the police arrive.
	What do we find has happened in this country? In the past 24 hours, the Metropolitan police force has been so hampered by the Home Secretary and the Chancellor that its policy of intelligence-led policing on burglary consists of giving up the investigation of all burglaries except those for which it already knows the crook in question.

David Blunkett: I thought we would soon get around to that. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will give me chapter and verse on what the Home Office has, or has not, said to the Met. Did it affect its decision last summer to introduce pilots in Enfield and Southwark? Did it affect the information that the force gave out on 2 December? We have done nothing that the right hon. Gentleman claims. Instead, we have done exactly what he asks us to do, which is to leave the decision making to the commissioner and the Metropolitan police.

Oliver Letwin: I am sure that the Home Secretary is not to blame for that particularly lunacy. I suspect that he—[Interruption.] I will answer the Home Secretary. When some journalist rang him as he rang me, I suspect he thought, as I thought, that it was an April fool's joke. I suspect that he had no prior knowledge that the police were going in that direction. My accusation against him is that he has made it impossible for the police to adopt any other system of policing. I do not believe that the commissioner, for whom the Home Secretary and I have a high regard, chose that course of action because he woke up one fine sunny day and thought it would be fun not to pursue most burglars. I suspect that he is bound up with bureaucracy, as the president elect of the Association of Chief Police Officers said just a day ago, and is unable to provide the policing that is required because the Home Secretary has made it impossible for him to do so.

Jonathan R Shaw: The right hon. Gentleman says that he frequently speaks to police officers, and he criticises the intelligence-led model. Will he come to Kent, where the intelligence-led model has been extremely effective in cutting burglary and gun crime year on year?

Oliver Letwin: I am a huge admirer of Sir David Phillips, the chief constable of Kent, who pioneered the intelligence-led model of policing. That has been a huge success in the restricted examples to which it has been applied at the higher end of crime. At the lower end of crime, however, intelligence-led policing is not possible without having police officers on the street because they cannot collect the intelligence unless they are there to do so. That is what is lacking in this country.

Jonathan R Shaw: We have more police officers in Kent doing exactly what the right hon. Gentleman describes than we had last year and the year before that.

Oliver Letwin: The hon. Gentleman and his constituents have more police officers, but not enough of them by a large measure. When the BBC, which is not a supporter of the Conservative party as far as I am aware, discovers in a poll that 28 per cent. of the people in Britain cannot remember when they last saw a police officer, it behoves Labour Members not to make a great song and dance about policing on our streets.

Chris Mullin: I think that the right hon. Gentleman is mistaken. We both have flats in Lambeth and I have seen more policemen on its streets in the past few months than I have seen in the 25 years that I have owned a flat there, including two officers on the Brixton road in the past half hour.

Oliver Letwin: I am tempted to say that the hon. Gentleman is in a privileged class of one. I know not what anecdotal evidence suggests about the police officers on the streets immediately adjoining his residence, but his colleague the Member of Parliament for that area does not share his view about the number of those officers or about the Home Office policy on drugs which is occupying most of their time because of the vast increase in drug-dealing networks.
	One half of a settled and coherent policy would be to get the police on the streets, but the other half would be to offer young people a way off the conveyor belt to crime, and I regret that the Home Secretary and his predecessor have been as deficient in that as in the matter of the police. We have not seen long-term rehabilitative sentences for young persistent offenders. We have not seen mandatory drug treatment and rehabilitation for young cocaine and heroin addicts. Neither of those measures has been implemented in an effective form. Instead we have seen a rash of initiatives, some of which will be discussed in the next debate, and a flood of money. Those policies are very ill-focused and there is no clear means of lifting the majority of young potential criminals off that conveyor belt to crime. If we do not do that we will never make a serious impact on the causes of crime about which the Prime Minister spoke so eloquently in opposition.

Simon Hughes: I share the right hon. Gentleman's concern about that matter. He knows that I share many of his criticisms and those of the public of what the Government have done, or failed to do, in the last five years. However, will the right hon. Gentleman explain to the country why it should now have greater confidence in his party when crime doubled during its 18 years in power and violent crime increased in every one of those years? What would make the Conservative party deal more effectively with crime and law and order now, when during its 18 years in office it lamentably failed to do what the right hon. Gentleman is now calling for?

Oliver Letwin: I do not believe that we can hope to make an impact on these problems without doing the very things that I have described: getting police on to the streets and getting young people off the conveyor belt to crime. The hon. Gentleman is well aware that the policies that we have been promoting for a year or more are new, and they offer the possibility of a serious attack on crime, in the way that American cities have attacked crime through policing and in the way that the Netherlands and Sweden have got young people off the conveyor belt to crime.
	I want to defend the record of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), because during each of his years as Home Secretary he remorselessly reduced levels of crimes such as burglary, both recorded crimes and those measured by the British crime survey. I shall tackle that in some detail, and I will reflect in a moment on what is happening to that record as a result of the Government's muddled messages and confused thinking.
	The second problem that we face, apart from the Government's failure to produce a serious long-term strategy, is the fact that the Home Secretary has sought to mask what people know are the realities of crime through irrelevant and illiberal high-profile measures in criminal justice Bills. That is the eye-catching initiative method of legislation. What has the proposed change to the double jeopardy rules to do with the kinds of crime that we are talking about today? Very little. What has the limitation of trial by jury in fraud cases to do with robbery, burglary or gun crime? Very little. The point of those eye-catching initiatives is to sound tough, and the tragedy is that in sounding tough the Home Secretary has succeeded in being illiberal without being effective. To be illiberal in order to be effective has a justification; to be liberal, admitting that one may be ineffective has a justification, but to be illiberal and ineffective is inexcusable. [Interruption.] I am charmed that the Home Secretary is so charmed by my remarks.
	Nowhere is that pattern of incoherence masked by lunges for ineffective, irrelevant and eye-catching initiatives more evident than in relation to recent sentencing policy. A little while ago, the Home Secretary made a magnificent discovery. He spotted ahead of the rest of us that his own figures—we had not seen them, but he had—were going to reveal a vast increase in gun crime. I imagine that an order went out in the Home Office saying XDo something—a headline is coming, so let us anticipate it." An order was eventually given: XLet us have mandatory sentences for gun crime." About 24 hours later—I am unable to ascertain the precise number of hours—a counter-order was given: XLet us have exceptions to the mandatory sentences for gun crime." There was a process of order, counter-order and disorder.
	The fact is that an initiative on sentencing was produced at short notice in relation to an anticipated headline and that it could not withstand even a day's scrutiny. However, that is small beer, as they say, in comparison with what has been happening on burglary. I admit that I should today very probably be tendering my resignation as shadow Home Secretary. I should have to do so on the ground of sheer mental inadequacy, as I have struggled mightily for many days now, but failed utterly to understand the Government's position on burglary sentencing. I do not know what it is that the Government have been trying to tell us; my powers of intellect have not been up to the task. I hope that, at the end of this debate, the Home Secretary will rescue me from the need to resign by informing me and unclouding a mind that is currently unable to wrestle with the ghastly question of whether the Government have a policy on burglary sentencing, and if so, what that policy may be.

Andrew Turner: I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way. I have no intention of attempting to compete with him in my powers of intellect, but I suggest to him that the Government's policy is very simple. It is to say one thing and then appoint subordinates such as the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice who will quietly arrange for something else to happen at ground level.

Oliver Letwin: I would assume because of the source and its plausibility that my hon. Friend is right, except that I think it is very difficult to describe the Lord Chancellor as a subordinate. Indeed, I suspect that, were it not said in this House, my hon. Friend's remark about the Lord Chancellor might lead to a legal action. I believe that the Lord Chancellor might think that it lowered him in the expectations of right-thinking men to be regarded as a subordinate. He may well believe that the Prime Minister is some form of subordinate; after all, I believe that he was one of the Lord Chancellor's clerks or pupils. The Lord High Chancellor of the United Kingdom is not a subordinate. He is clearly the most senior Law Officer of the United Kingdom, or at any rate of England and Wales—or at any rate of something.
	I heard with my own ears what the Lord Chancellor said when he appeared on a radio programme. It was not an April fools' joke; it may be that the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis was merely trying to fool us, but he was not. In a briefing, Mr. Alastair Campbell or some other Downing street minion who is genuinely a subordinate said that they were not sure what he said, but I heard him, so I was sure. What I do not understand is what on earth he meant. I do not know what the Prime Minister's spokesman meant when he slapped down—I believe that that is the phrase—the Lord Chancellor. I would not like to try doing it myself, but he apparently did so. I do not know what the Home Secretary said when he stood with the Attorney-General and the Lord Chief Justice—

Chris Bryant: Waffle.

Oliver Letwin: Yes, that it is exactly it. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Nobody in the United Kingdom has the slightest idea what the Government's policy is on the sentencing of burglars, but the burglars are beginning to get an idea. Their idea is roughly that, on the whole, except in appropriate circumstances, as the Prime Minister said—we do not know what those circumstances are—they should not expect to go to jail. That is, of course, if they are investigated. If they are not investigated they are unlikely to go to jail because they will not be caught in the first place. However, if they are caught, and thus among the unlucky few who have been investigated, they might go to jail, but they will not. Perhaps they will under appropriate circumstances or after the second or third time that they have been caught.

Ian Lucas: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Oliver Letwin: I shall give way shortly in anticipation of some blinding insight into the Government's policy.
	I have been jesting, but there is a serious issue. Confusion has been sown, affecting a subject that is not a laughing matter for many of our constituents. They regard burglary as serious and they want to be protected against it. They have noticed what we, the Home Secretary and his statisticians and researchers have noticed. The Home Office has paid for a thorough survey, entailing great expense, of sentencing policy and its effects on crime. Lo and behold, it shows that burglary is the one crime that tends to be significantly affected by sentencing policy. It shows exactly the same as the British crime survey and recorded crime figures.
	That is why I said to the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) that we would return to the efforts of my right hon. and learned Friend the current shadow Chancellor. From the moment he put pressure on the judiciary to increase sentences for burglary, the trend decreased. According to the BCS, that trend levelled off from 2000 and the burglary rate started rising.
	The announcements, counter-announcements, unannouncements and disannouncements of the past week will affect burglary statistics badly and they are therefore no laughing matter. They will affect our constituents adversely.

Ian Lucas: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that sentencing individual burglars in individual cases should be a matter for the individual judge who has heard the facts?

Oliver Letwin: Yes, but—[Interruption.] No, I unequivocally agree with the hon. Gentleman, but guidelines exist, and the Lord Chief Justice currently sets them. Under the Criminal Justice Bill, a sentencing council will set them, with some consultation with Parliament. We shall propose amendments. It is time to remove Ministers—of all parties—from the position, which they have held for many years, of well-informed commentators on sentencing policy, holding forth from the public bar of a public house. It is time for the House to take charge of sentencing policy guidelines.
	The judgments of judges in individual cases are properly the preserve of the judiciary, but I have long considered the matter in the past year and the events of the past week have crystallised my view.

David Blunkett: Does that constitute a sudden spasm, a new initiative, a knee-jerk reaction or has it taken 18 months, the Bill, our proposals for sentencing guidelines and our decision to involve Parliament for the right hon. Gentleman to make the amazing intellectual leap to wishing to ensure that Parliament has control over sentencing guidelines?

Oliver Letwin: Oddly enough, none of those things. I began speaking about the matter in July, having begun considering it in March.

Chris Bryant: Began.

Oliver Letwin: No. XHaving begun" is a form of the verb that takes one backwards, not forwards, for the hon. Gentleman's education.
	In December, I issued a statement that it was official Tory party policy to move an amendment to the effect that I described. Given the circumstances, I do not blame the Home Secretary for not noticing. However, I hope that we can reach consensus on the matter and give the Government room for manoeuvre. I accept that some members of the judiciary will be critical of the step that I would like to take. However, I hope that creating a clear distinction between an individual judge in a case and policy guidelines means that we achieve a lasting settlement.
	I am conscious that the Home Secretary's problems with, for example, gun crime, are not unprecedented.
	As things stand, Parliament has but three options. It can set a maximum that has little effect in practice, and is modulated through the guidelines into whatever the then judiciary seek to modulate it into; it can set mandatory sentences that are too rigid to accommodate the judgment of an individual judge; or it can set mandatory sentences with exceptions that quickly become the norm through policy guidelines set by the Lord Chief Justice.
	None of those methods is satisfactory. Our fellow citizens expect that, when they elect us and send us to this place, they will influence not just the legislative definition of crimes but the effect of so defining them. The ordinary person believes, I suspect, what I believed 18 months ago, before I took on this crazy job. I was under the lunatic misapprehension that Parliament set the basic sentencing framework and judges then interpreted it in individual cases, but that is not so at present, and it is the state of affairs that we need to achieve.

Henry Bellingham: Is my right hon. Friend aware of a case that arose in my constituency last week? Gary Callaby admitted three offences of burglary, one of theft and one of arson, and asked for four other offences of burglary to be taken into consideration. The judge said that if the latest guidelines had not come out, it would have been a prison sentence. There is one burglar in my constituency who is laughing, and one judge who is extremely angry about the way in which his hands were tied.

Oliver Letwin: My hon. Friend makes a serious point, which relates to a specific case. If he and I were judges, we would be bound to pay the most solemn attention to the guidelines produced by the Lord Chief Justice. That is the problem: there is a disjunction between the view of the very senior judiciary and what I think is the view of about 98 per cent. of our fellow citizens, and—this is the irony—the joint view, I suspect, of the Home Secretary and myself. Both sides of the House overwhelmingly support a particular stance on the guidelines; many of the judiciary themselves support it; a vast weight of the population supports it; yet we are powerless to bring it about, which cannot be right.
	We find ourselves in a bizarre situation. The current Prime Minister came to power with some great slogans. XEducation, education, education" I think I remember, dimly. I recall also Xfrom welfare to work". Above all, however, I recall Xtough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". That is well on the way to becoming this Government's version of XCrisis? What crisis?".
	The fact is that we have a crisis of police demoralisation. We have a crisis of confidence, or lack of confidence, of the people in the criminal justice system. We have a crisis of old people too frightened to leave their homes, who are in effect subject to a life sentence. We have a crisis of young mothers who dare not take their children to playgrounds. We have a crisis of streets and neighbourhoods that are under the control of gun gangs, pimps and drug dealers. We have a crisis that amounts to a retreat of civilisation and a loss of control of the streets for the honest citizen. The Government are failing on crime, and in so doing they are failing English society.

David Blunkett: I beg to move, To leave out from XHouse" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	Xwelcomes the steps the Government has taken and continues to take to reform all aspects of law enforcement including increasing police numbers to record levels and the 6.1 per cent. increase in police funding for 2003–04; further welcomes the steps the Government is taking to modernise the criminal justice system through the coherent long-term strategies and the introduction of the Criminal Justice Bill; notes that for the last five years crime rates have fallen by 27 per cent. according to the British Crime Survey, that burglary has reduced by 39 per cent. since 1997 and that the chances of becoming a victim of crime are as low as at any time in the last 20 years; and particularly supports the decisive action being taken by the Government to tackle street crime and the rise in gun-related crime."
	I ask the House to reject a motion, which, if it were not so serious, would be laughable. The right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) has made a supreme bid to outdo the leader of the Liberal Democrats in joining XHave I Got News For You". I was going to say XDrop the Dead Donkey", but after last week I had probably better not.
	Let's face it: every time a set of statistics is published, every time a high-profile crime is committed, people believe the evidence of the front page but not the evidence placed before them. It behoves us, in a debate of this sort, to get to grips with the real issues. The right hon. Gentleman said, after an amusing interlude, that this was not a laughing matter, and indeed it is not. He said that confusion did Xbad things" to the message to potential burglars, and of course he is right. He rightly said that we need to take much more control of the guidance that goes out, and we do. That is why we put such measures in the Criminal Justice Bill and published them in the White Paper last July. I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman was thinking about that at the time. I do not remember him saying anything when we published the White Paper or the Bill, but I am happy to be corrected on that.
	Confusion damages the signal that is sent out, and, therefore, the culture on the streets. The Lord Chief Justice is, rightly, independent—the judiciary must remain independent and I challenge any Opposition Member to suggest otherwise—and he will be as concerned as I am, and as I am sure the Lord Chancellor is, that we get the message right and that it is clear. I am sure that he will contribute, as I intend to do this afternoon, to ensuring that the guidance that has gone out is clarified, and that judges who misunderstand or misinterpret it are left in no doubt that there is a very clear policy coming out as part of that guidance.

Simon Hughes: I absolutely agree with the Home Secretary; it is very important that accurate statistics are given, so that the media cannot misrepresent the truth. That being the case, what does he say to the chairman of the Statistics Commission, Sir John Kingman, who wrote to him on 1 October—I quote accurately—to say:
	XWe were, however, concerned that you had felt forced by ill-based comments to publish a set of interim figures on street crime in what could be seen as a selective fashion, rather than sticking to your guns and waiting for the national statistics. Not all management information can or should be published, but it is important that when such data are published, whether they are national statistics or not, that there should be no suspicion that Government is picking and choosing, publishing the good news and not the bad."

David Blunkett: I agree entirely with that last sentiment. To publish only good news and not bad would be a luxury I could not afford, and one that we do not have. No one could pretend that we have hidden the facts. This time last year, we made it absolutely clear that we believed that street crime—robbery and snatch theft—had reached a point at which direct intervention was required, and, it has to be said, that intervention was successful. The reason that we published information in the autumn was precisely to avoid the complete untruth that was being perpetrated at the time and is being perpetrated now, namely, that the street crime initiative had failed. In March last year the main Opposition party declared it another initiative on another day, and that it was bound to be a failure, but by October, its own publication had acknowledged that it had succeeded. The reason that we published a full evaluation of the first period of the full street crime programme after six months was precisely because we had said that within six months we would reverse the trend, and that the incidences of robbery and snatch theft would fall. They have, and they are. The statistics that we published last Thursday showed a 10 per cent. drop in robbery figures. So the straight lies that were being told last week, and reiterated and perpetrated, for instance by the leader of the Conservative party on XThe World at One" on Friday, when he simply lied [Interruption.]—

Mr. Speaker: Order. We had best have temperate language in the House. I would ask the Home Secretary to withdraw that remark. The right hon. Gentleman is a Member of this House.

David Blunkett: Of course, at your request, Mr Speaker, I will.
	Let me put it another way. The Leader of the official Opposition completely misunderstood and misinterpreted the statistics that had been published the day before, by declaring that all sectors of crime had gone up when the vast majority of sectors of crime had just been shown to have come down. According to the official statistics, burglary has come down by 39 per cent. since 1997, and, according to the British recorded crime survey—the largest and most highly respected such survey in the world—has come down over the previous 12 months to September by 7 per cent. Street robbery has come down, and the police are proud of their record in terms of what they have done to deal with street robbery over the past nine months. I am proud of them as well, because they have made this work. If, however, someone says that street robbery has risen when it has fallen, I presume that they have either misinterpreted the statistics, that they have a problem with numeracy, or that they are just trying to make mischief. I presume, Mr. Speaker, that that language is acceptable to the whole House.

David Cameron: The Lord Chancellor said on the radio that the Home Secretary agrees with the guidance given by the Lord Chief Justice on the sentencing of burglars. Was he right to say that?

David Blunkett: The Lord Chancellor was perfectly right to say that he, the Attorney-General and I had agreed with the Lord Chief Justice last March on a clear statement on sentencing, which followed the clear statement on sentencing that I made on 5 July, a month after taking over as Home Secretary and when we had the first ever national probation conference. I spelled out my intentions clearly, which were to ensure that we reduce the incidence of crime and, in particular, reoffending with the aim of cutting the number of people who go to prison through ensuring that they no longer commit crimes, rather than having the objective of sending more people to prison who then reoffend and have to be sent to prison again. I repeat that, because, in my view, it is straight common sense.
	I also believe that those who commit repeat crimes should, per se, be sent to custody. The introduction of custody minus was not included in the Halliday report, but it is, I think, a proposal that has commanded support across the House. I say XI think" because a number of proposals that commanded support across the House on 4 December appear not to command the support of the whole House just over a month later, even though the official Opposition did not vote against the Criminal Justice Bill on Second Reading as they agree with a large proportion of what we are putting forward.

William Cash: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

David Blunkett: Let me finish on sentencing before I let the hon. Gentleman intervene. Let us get it on the record properly.
	For the first time, we set out in the legislation the objective of sentencing, which is to ensure that our streets are safer whereby those who are dangerous sexual and violent offenders are put away, and put away for longer, and action is taken when they are away to ensure that they do not reoffend if and when they come out. That is clear and I hope that anyone could agree with it. Those who have committed repeat offences—that includes committing a new offence for the first time—should expect to go to prison.
	We should expect to mix prison and community sentencing in the way described in the Bill and as I described on 4 February last year at the prison governors' conference—in a new, imaginative way to avoid reoffending. We should ensure reparation to the victim. We must ensure that we tackle the scandals of the intimidation of witnesses and the delays and repeat delays that they have to put up with, which ensure that they do not want to take part in the criminal justice system. Where people have offended non-violently for the first time, we make a sensible judgment in the courts, allowing the judiciary—the magistracy and the judges—to decide whether a new range of tougher community sentences should come into play to ensure that such people have the opportunity of rehabilitation.
	It seems to me that, unless we are to go down the road of spending all the money available to us through the criminal justice system on even more prison places year after year, there is no alternative but to have an incremental, stepped approach under which custody minus and custody plus play their part. I heard someone guffawing about tougher community sentences. Community sentences can be not only tough, but as effective as prison in terms of avoiding reoffending if they are rightly designed and if they involve, for instance, proper drug treatment after testing. The investment of #500 million, which we are making, over the next three years will make that real.
	A party that is against increased public expenditure, that has opposed the Chancellor's investment in public services and that would have prevented us from having the new deal programme, which has taken the very young people referred to from the Front Bench by the right hon. Member for West Dorset out of unemployment and despair, has no right whatever to take us to task. We have reduced crime, reduced burglary, reduced robbery and reduced street theft and we have turned around a system in which there was no Youth Justice Board and no programme of long-term investment in reducing young people's reoffending. We have turned around young people's reoffending by 14.6 per cent. That is an official figure, which is on the record—[Interruption.] I am being told that no one believes official statistics. Does that have anything to do with people who believe that they are intelligent, including highly intelligent and thoughtful leader writers for The Times, who have written about the publication of the national crime recording standard—recently revamped by chief constables, not us, so that it is more transparent and involves more recording, for example on CCTV, as well as crimes otherwise recorded? There is more recording, of course, because there are more police to undertake recording and greater confidence that they will do something. Who would believe that a leader writer for The Times would be so puzzled as to suggest that publishing that recording standard alongside the British crime survey, involving a 40,000 sample, was a deliberate ploy to confuse the British people? The answer is anyone who had not read previous leaders in The Times—for three years, they have been pressing us to publish both figures—or anyone who had not read previous editors of The Times, such as Simon Jenkins, who pressed us to use the British crime survey rather than the national crime recording standard because it is more accurate and is not subject to the vagaries of recording methods.

Michael Fabricant: Do not knock the media.

David Blunkett: I am not—I am taking up the point that no one believes the figures. Is it any surprise that that is so when people who have the intelligence to know better suggest that official statistics are either confusing or fiddled?

William Cash: Does the Home Secretary remember that during an interview on the XToday" programme about first-time offenders, and in the context of the agreement between the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney-General, the Lord Chancellor used the words
	Xonly as a last resort".
	Does the Home Secretary agree with that statement?

David Blunkett: For first-time offenders, I agree entirely and have just said so. I have made it absolutely clear that people who have committed non-violent offences for the first time should be considered for tough community sentences or drug rehabilitation—that is not a mixed message. The right hon. Member for West Dorset, started off by saying that I would agree with him—I do, on the importance of community policing and the role of the community. I agree with what he said on the XToday" programme in December, which was reprinted in a number of newspapers. He said that
	Xif we have serious community sentencing"—
	an Opposition Member just guffawed when I suggested that—
	Xif people were engaged in things which were tough, if there was real rehabilitation for the drug addicts, then I think there is a great deal to be said for trying to distinguish between first-time burglars . . . and persistent violent criminals."
	I have this on the record. Surprise, surprise, on 9 January the right hon. Gentleman had changed his mind. When Jim Naughtie quoted his own words back to him, he said that, no, he did not have much sympathy with the idea, although he went on to say that he was looking carefully and learning. He had obviously changed his mind between the third week in December—when, in a spirit of Christmas cheer, he was going to give first-time offenders a chance—and 9 January, when it was expedient not to do so. That is the truth.

Oliver Letwin: I am going to do something that the Home Secretary may or may not be surprised by. He is right: I changed my mind. Let me explain why. I started looking at what had happened to burglary, and I found that, since 1992, with more and longer custodial sentences, burglary rates, unlike those for many other crimes, really responded. That was the evidence from the Home Office's own publications. I hope that he will now join me and change his mind, too, because when the facts tell us that custodial sentences can impede burglary, we should listen.

David Blunkett: There are times, I hope, when I am prepared to change my mind. Indeed, I can think of at least one in the past 18 months. However, I cannot remember changing my mind within a fortnight about something that I had said on the radio.

Chris Bryant: Mixed messages.

David Blunkett: Yes, it would be a terribly mixed message, because if the right hon. Gentleman were Home Secretary, he would have said something before Christmas and then, having heard the Lord Chief Justice, he would have thought about it, then he would have contradicted the Lord Chief Justice, who would then have had to go back to the position that he had held in the first place, before the right hon. Gentleman had had time to think about it.

Oliver Letwin: The Home Secretary has now made my case for Parliament to consider and decide on the sentencing guidelines. Had we been in a position—as I hope he will agree that, through an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, we need to be—to debate these matters properly instead of having to react to a comment from the Lord Chief Justice one fine morning, we could have come to a settled view after sensible democratic debate. That is one of the reasons why I have become convinced that we need to make such a change.

David Blunkett: I am very pleased, because I do not disagree at all, other than to say that the suggestion about the Sentencing Guidelines Council was mine, not the right hon. Gentleman's—and it is in the Bill. I give him this pledge. I am very happy for Opposition Members in Committee to table amendments to strengthen the role of the Sentencing Guidelines Council vis-à-vis Parliament. Let us debate it, not least because, a year last July, when I talked about sentencing and we published the White Paper, I said that I would be happy for Opposition parties to make proposals on sentencing. That was part of the nationwide consultation process.
	We all suffer amnesia at one point or another. In chiding me about minimum sentences for the illegal carrying of guns, the right hon. Gentleman had a little moment of amnesia, having forgotten that on 2 December, before I went into hospital, I made it clear in Home Office questions, in a reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), that we were in the process of responding to the chief constables' call for a five-year minimum sentence.

Graham Allen: I thank my right hon. Friend for saying again, as he did on Second Reading, that he is prepared to entertain rational, sensible change to make the Criminal Justice Bill a better Bill. That has been his position right the way through. I hope that he will allow sensible amendments not only from Opposition Members, but from his own colleagues. Many of us feel that any sentencing council should include members of the Executive, the legislature and the judiciary, and that had we had such a council, with all our political arms represented, some of the strange decisions that individual members of the judiciary appear to have made might not have taken place. I thank my right hon. Friend again for his warm expression towards open government.

David Blunkett: I shall weigh those commendatory words very carefully. I am in favour of fewer but good amendments, rather than lots of them, and the Committee will no doubt share that view.

Simon Hughes: This is a very important issue. As it happens, today I spoke to some circuit judges about how one establishes a sentencing guidelines council that reflects the community at large. Will the Home Secretary look seriously at a proposal that, unlike the current one, does not require all nominees to be nominated by the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice or the Home Secretary? There should be some way to enable people to put their own names forward, and to enable those who do not hold high office to choose who sits on such a body. Such people should range from 18-year-olds to 80-year-olds, so that the body is really representative of the public at large.

David Blunkett: I am in favour of trying to ensure that we get people on to the Sentencing Guidelines Council who reflect the wider views, age and make-up of the community whom we serve. Someone has to decide who sits on this body, and certain people—the Government—have to take responsibility for the medium and long-term consequences, including the reaction of the judiciary. We do have a separation of powers, and we walk a tightrope in terms of maintaining it. I say to the whole House that it is no good someone's being in favour of the independence of a particular sector of our balanced constitution one minute—or one fortnight—and being against it the next, when it is expedient to change their mind.

Oliver Letwin: I am grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way again—he is being very generous—as we are discussing a very important point and we are near to making progress. Our proposal is not that we should make some minor or major alterations to the Sentencing Guidelines Council, but that Parliament should take the power to set the guidelines. That is a critical distinction, which observes the independence of the judiciary—in the sense of the utter independence of an individual judge in an individual case—but gives to Parliament the right to set the guidelines. Will the Home Secretary consider that proposal?

David Blunkett: I certainly would not rule it out, and for this reason. Often—although not in every single detail, and not in respect of every one of the thousands of sentencing possibilities—for major sentences the House does take that power. What Parliament expects to be done is included in legislation, and that is what we are doing in respect of the Criminal Justice Bill. We are doing that by toughening up enormously on the most dangerous violent and sexual offenders, and I expect us to do so through legislation on sex offenders and sex offences that we will bring forward shortly. So the principle of Parliament's deciding on particular aspects of sentencing is already established; however, the extent to which it could cope with the work currently undertaken by the advisory panel—in future, it will be undertaken by the Sentencing Guidelines Council—is an interesting and moot point.
	I know that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, Central (Hilary Benn), will want to mull over this issue before we reach the point in Committee where we have to consider how many hours are available in the day, and how many Members—on both sides of the House—would be able to spend their time on this issue. However, getting the principles right is unexceptionable, and we should do so for the sake of the British people's confidence in the criminal justice system, for the legitimacy of our democracy, and for the credibility of Parliament itself. I said all that on 4 December, when we moved the Second Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill.

Graham Allen: rose—

Elfyn Llwyd: rose—

David Blunkett: I shall give way first to the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd), as I have yet to do so.

Elfyn Llwyd: I am much obliged to the Home Secretary, and I am listening carefully to what he has to say. A moment ago, he said that good rehabilitation is vital and he is absolutely right, but what would be his advice to sentencers in Wales, where there are fewer than 40 rehabilitation beds throughout the country?

David Blunkett: We should join together in the variety of funding streams and constitutional responsibilities that lie between Westminster and the Assembly in Wales, not merely in terms of those directly engaged in rehabilitation, but—as the shadow Home Secretary correctly said—in terms of investment in drug treatment and rehabilitation. Common ground would exist there, as it would on a number of the issues that we debated on 4 December, on which we were at one.

Graham Allen: I thank my right hon. Friend for his generosity in giving way again. Normally the House does what the Government of the day decide. If the Floor makes the decision, it will in effect be the Home Secretary who has the power to make changes to sentencing. He talks about mulling this over; I hope that he will also Xmullin" it over with my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. There are ways of involving the House other than the Floor, which is often in the pocket of the Executive. Involving the Select Committee might be a way for Parliament, the Executive and the judiciary to decide on a sentencing policy that will command public support and consensus.

David Blunkett: I reaffirm that I am certainly in nobody's pocket, and will remain that way for as long as possible. I remember responding to my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) on this point. I am very sympathetic to the idea of the Select Committee taking a powerful role in this area, and I think that we are moving towards a consensus.
	To give the rest of the House the chance to debate this, let me deal quickly with the two central issues raised by the right hon. Member for West Dorset, the first of which concerned community policing. It was a year ago, almost to the day, that I asked Bill Braddon, the former commissioner for police in New York, now in Los Angeles, to speak to the second of the major meetings of all chief constables and police authorities that I had called in London. Bill Braddon spelled out his view of community policing and how we need to tackle antisocial behaviour so that we send the right signals to those who would otherwise grow into organised crime and therefore violent and, eventually, gun crime. In his view, we needed to ensure that the police were on the street, that they used the variation of the comstat system being developed in a number of police authorities in Britain, and that not only should we increase police numbers, we should consider, as the New York police did, integrating different elements of policing. That is why we were in favour of community support officers.
	All those things we have done. The 5,000 extra police officers whom I expect to have, over and above those we inherited, by later this year, the commitment that I have made for another 2,500 on top of the commitment for another 130,000 police officers for this time next year are not only articles of good faith but represent the reality of increased police officers available on the beat. The O'Dowd report on slimming down bureaucracy, the massive cut that we have already made in the amount of paperwork, the XDiary of a Police Officer" and the 400 examples drawn from it, which led to the O'Dowd report, are all examples of removing unnecessary paperwork and data collection. However, data collection still needs to exist. Understanding how we operate intelligence policing and the Comstat system depends on having the information in the first place. New technology, our investment in the new airwave system, people's ability to communicate adequately and quickly and forensic science all make a difference if—and this is the real issue—the chief constable and the immediate command are prepared to take on the challenge.
	There is a second difficulty with people saying that they want to be independent of Government in one breath and the tools of Government in the next. The difficulty that we have with the judiciary is mirrored by the police. Everyone, it appears, wants the police to be independent of Government, particularly the Home Office. Opposition Members speak about it all the time—they reiterated it this afternoon. They want the Home Office to be hands-off. They criticise the development of a standards unit. They criticise the direction that we give in the national policing plan. They criticise prioritisation, which includes everything that has been spoken about both today and at Home Office questions and over and over in debate. They cheer when chief constables have a go, as they did when the right hon. Member for West Dorset mentioned Chris Fox, incoming chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers. Let me quote what Chris Fox said so that we may all understand just what the position is and so that we are not total hypocrites. He said that new laws allow me to send in Xhit squads", and that I have set a growing list of priorities for chiefs to concentrate on. He added:
	XThe police's autonomy is being eroded and it's a dangerous development . . . Any student of political history will tell you that the first thing a revolutionary state does is take hold of the police."
	I have read that out only because I want to reassure the Labour party in the weeks ahead that it at last has a Xrevolutionary state" at its disposal.
	What people really want is a police force that responds precisely to the priorities seen and felt by every Member of the House, irrespective of political party. They want antisocial behaviour to be clamped down on. They want a feeling of respect and safety on the street. They want their homes to be safe. They want the police to tackle burglary and to investigate wherever there is any evidence that can be followed up.
	As it happens, that is what the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis had in mind on 2 December when, independently from the Home Office and without interference from Ministers, he prioritised after an experiment in two boroughs. In one of those boroughs, the conviction rate for burglary increased by 21 per cent. Should I interfere? Should I tell him to reissue the guidance that he sent out on 2 December? The House cannot have it both ways. It cannot be that passing legislation is interference. It cannot be that issuing guidelines, creating a national policing plan and asking local police authorities to engage with chief constables on real prioritisation on behalf of the community are all considered to be interference, while Opposition Members demand in the next breath that I introduce community policing, order police on to the streets and change the policing priorities of chief constables. They cannot have it both ways.
	Nor can the Opposition have it both ways on the second of the priorities set out by the right hon. Member for West Dorset. We cannot invest in getting young people back into work through the new deal and then condemn it and say that there would not have been the funding for it. We cannot have a Youth Justice Board and then say that we would pull the money out. We cannot say that we would cut public spending, then demand more and more public spending, including #500 million on top of what we have announced, which, before Christmas, the right hon. Gentleman said he would invest in drug treatment. I do not know where he is going to get that money.

Oliver Letwin: Not on top, but instead of.

David Blunkett: Instead of what?

Oliver Letwin: rose—

David Blunkett: Does the right hon. Gentleman mean that we should go back to having fewer police, as was happening in 1997 when we came into office? There were no community support officers, street wardens had been condemned, there was lower investment in probation in the community and less investment in prisons. That is what was happening. We will have 3,500 more prison places on stream by the end of this year than we did last spring when it was announced in the Budget that we had extra money. All that has cost us, but it would cost the public dear if we did not do it. Let us stop the hypocrisy—

Oliver Letwin: Will the Home Secretary give way?

David Blunkett: Well done. That was just like Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday afternoon in that the right hon. Gentleman almost got me offside.

Oliver Letwin: I am delighted. Before the right hon. Gentleman works himself up into too much of a lather, let me tell him that I shall argue in the next debate this evening that the Government's spending on getting people into contact with about 236,000 treatment agencies is heavily misconceived. That money should be used in the way that we have described. That would happen to cost less rather than more, and we would be able to spend even more than we want to without exceeding the right hon. Gentleman's budget for drugs.

David Blunkett: I am just as cheered by that intervention as I was on Saturday afternoon when Sheffield Wednesday was losing 2-0 but won 3-2, with a brilliant goal to put us into the lead.
	The right hon. Gentleman has not taken us any further forward so my diatribe will continue: more police; more community support officers; more street wardens; more prison places; more investment in probation; the Youth Justice Board doing the job we asked of it; and above all a changing culture and climate. That change involves parents and families and a different atmosphere in schools; it involves hope for young people, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, spelled out today with reference to the Xsplash" schemes that we introduced last summer and our investment in prevention and diversion.
	We are ensuring that there is an understanding between the Government and the independent judiciary and that the messages are clear and that they really count: if people commit violent, dangerous sexual offences, are repeat offenders, cause havoc or fail to avoid reoffending, they will go to prison. First-time offenders will be given a chance, which will be backed up by support to repair the damage so that they can put themselves on the straight and narrow.
	We want to get the message across: tough where we have to be and common sense where it is needed. We need a stop to the contradictions and, yes, the sneering coming from the Opposition. We need to get rid of hypocrisy and in its place send everyone the clear message that we are getting tough on crime, and that we will not get knocked off course by silly suggestions that thought-through policies are knee-jerk reactions because someone has not read about them in Hansard or has not checked their computer to find out what was said. The policies are sensible and address the needs of the British people so that there will be a reduction in crime and common sense will prevail.

Simon Hughes: Following last week's publication of the recent crime figures, a debate on the criminal justice system and law and order is especially timely. To that extent, I welcome the debate initiated by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) and his colleagues.
	Despite some positive long-term trends, it is clear to us all that crime is a hugely unwelcome feature of everyday life throughout Britain. Statistics published last week show that one person in four was a victim of crime last year—an unacceptably high level.
	I want my remarks to be fair, so I must say that the Government have done some good things—but they have not done enough to reassure the public that problems are being brought under control and that crime is going down. The statistics are abundantly clear: the public are not persuaded that we are moving in the right direction. The result, sadly, is that people are losing faith in both the police and the criminal justice system. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen), who, like me, is a member of the Standing Committee on the Criminal Justice Bill, regularly makes the point that we are all trying to restore faith in the twin pillars of a civilised society: the belief that the police can and will do their job properly and that, thereafter, the criminal justice system will do its job properly; both might be trying hard, but at present they are not succeeding.
	In our view, which we share with the Conservative Opposition, one of the problems is that the Government keep trying to tinker with the system. There have been hundreds of targets and hundreds of headline-grabbing initiatives, but they do not amount to a coherent strategy. There have been too many instances of the Government manipulating the figures to try to make things sound the way they want them to sound. I gave the Home Secretary an example of that when, in respect of something that happened only three months ago, I referred to the remarks of the chairman of the Statistics Commission.
	After this debate, I hope that we shall achieve a better consensus, based on independently produced facts and figures. I pointed out to the previous Home Secretary, now the Foreign Secretary, who was keen that we should agree on such things, that if we could reach agreement on the statistics and the evidence about what does or does not work, we would make huge progress. I hope that that is the wish of the Government and I commend the work of Home Office research, development and statistics directorate. If everyone read its work rather than the front page of the tabloids, we should make much more progress.
	Policies must be seen to be fair to all people in society, because the poorest often suffer the most. The most deprived areas may suffer from the most crime, but they also have the most victims. Our police service must be much more effective at deterring and catching criminals. The clear-up rate is one in four across the country and one in eight in London, so the statistical odds for those who want to try crime are pretty good and they offer a high incentive to do so.
	We need an effective sentencing system. If someone asked me to give a quote or a soundbite, I would replace the soundbite that the Prime Minister used when he was shadow Home Secretary—Xtough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"—with Xeffective on crime, effective on the causes of crime", because sometimes what sounds simplistically tough may not be nearly as effective as something that initially does not sound effective but proves to be so in practice.

Graham Allen: Achieving consensus on which statistics are accurate or even on the need for some new form of sentencing, whatever form the Sentencing Guidelines Council takes, might be classic territory for pre-legislative scrutiny. Instead of hurrying Bills into Committee, as it is apparently necessary to do, it would be better to have at least four, five, six, seven or eight weeks during which we could determine some of the core issues without partisanship. Surely that would be a better way to proceed than the sometimes rather sterile, lawyerly debates that we have in Committee.

Simon Hughes: I agree. To their credit, the Government asked Mr. Halliday to review sentencing and Lord Justice Auld to review the criminal justice process, after which they published a White Paper. I compliment them on the fact that there has been much pre-legislative activity, but it would have been better if there had been pre-legislative scrutiny as well.
	Another suggestion is that bodies such as the Select Committee on Home Affairs could nominate people to the Sentencing Guidelines Council, thereby ensuring cross-party agreement. That would command more confidence than the current proposal. However much the Home Secretary does such things on the best evidence available, by definition they are perceived as being done by a party office holder, and I am sure that we could do better than that.

Dominic Grieve: Is it not the case that parts of the Criminal Justice Bill have not been scrutinised in Committee because the Government's timetable fails to make enough time available? In fact, far from having pre-legislative scrutiny, we are enacting legislation that will not have been adequately scrutinised by a perfectly co-operative Standing Committee.

Simon Hughes: The hon. Gentleman will know that I agree with him about that. I see the Committee Whip on the Treasury Bench, and it is not at all his fault; he has been entirely co-operative and reasonable. We are constrained, and since the election the Home Office's legislative programme has been the greatest victim of such constraints. Bill after Bill has not been fully debated in the House of Commons. Additional amendments have been tabled in this House or the House of Lords, and large parts of Bills have not been debated at all. Whatever we think about the policies, that is clearly an absolutely crass way to legislate on issues of law and order, liberty and freedom, which matter to all of us and to all those whom we represent.
	I wish to mention one other general matter. Whether we are talking about the big villains or the little villains, we should not tolerate a lawless society. Violence must be met with a presumption of custody, as I have said at my party's conference and in other places.
	I would add three other categories for which the presumption should be custody. Those who drive in such a way that they risk and sometimes cause injury or death should expect to go away. Many families are victims of so-called road accidents that are actually not accidents at all; they involve intentional or reckless activity by drivers. Those involved in child pornography should expect to go away, because it is such an abuse of innocence and childhood. Those who interfere with the course of justice should also expect to go away, so that everybody knows the score. I would include in the violence category those who burgle residential property when they know that there is somebody in the property or that there is a risk that somebody is in the property. For me, that crosses the line between something that does not personally affect or threaten somebody psychologically, mentally or physically, and something that does.

David Cameron: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Simon Hughes: No.
	This is a difficult area, and it has been the subject of great debate recently. There are differences. I accept the attempts being made to make sure that the first-time burglar does not go to prison on that occasion, and I shall explain why that would be the wrong course. When somebody enters a property and frightens an elderly lady out of her wits, however, the egg-shell skull principle, as it used to be called in civil law, should apply: one must take a place as one finds it. If there are kids, people on their own, elderly or vulnerable people, the offender must expect the courts to punish him. That is why I am sympathetic to the constituency case raised by the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), which was reported in The Sunday Times, where an offender was returned to live three doors from the person whose house he had burgled. The courts should have taken that into account: it is improper for the victim of a first-time burglar to feel that that person is at liberty, three doors away, having been into their house only a few months previously.

Graham Allen: I thank the hon. Gentleman for being generous in giving way to me for a second time. One of the comments that we hear most when we are in our constituencies is that a sentence does not mean what is stated when it is passed. Does the hon. Gentleman feel that, in respect of the offences that he has listed or others that the Government may care to add, standard sentences should be set out in a schedule to the Bill that is being considered Upstairs? Everybody would therefore know exactly what the sentence would be in a normal case, and that information would be available in one place. Would he propose that to the Government, along with me?

Simon Hughes: There are several things with which I hope the hon. Gentleman would agree. First, we must get all the legislation in one place so that it can be seen and read easily. At the moment, we struggle with amending Bills, and it is difficult to find things, which is unhelpful. Secondly, a penal code would be helpful—which, to his credit, the Home Secretary favours and which I support, as he has heard me say. I am in favour of there being easy access to information on what the maximum sentence should be for each crime, and to what the guidelines say that the sentence should be. I support both those proposals.
	I am clear, however, as Liberal Democrats have always been clear, that there should never be mandatory sentences. We have argued against such sentences for murder and in respect of lesser crimes. In the case of murder, there is all the difference in the world between somebody who plans to go out and shoot somebody with whom they have had a row the previous day and somebody who kills their husband after 30 years of domestic violence. It is entirely inappropriate to have the same automatic starting sentence for those two incidents.
	Offenders who do not use violence, however, should expect that a custodial sentence would not be the presumption. I agree with the Home Secretary that we must guard against going down the road of arguing for prison to be the answer to a whole list of offences, especially non-violent ones. For those offences, the option should be supervision and treatment in the community wherever possible. To pick up the point of the hon. Member for Nottingham, North—this is why the Halliday reforms are welcome—we should have a sentencing system in which the first half of a custodial sentence is served inside, but the second half, which is equally part of the sentence, is served outside, as the Government, to their credit, are proposing, by and large, in their sentencing reforms. What has been hopeless in the past is that people have thought that their sentence finished the moment they came out through the prison door, but the reality is that, without support, supervision, probation, drug treatment or alcohol treatment they have started to reoffend. The sentence should continue for an equal period, or at least a significant period, outside as well as inside prison. That should be part of the sentence, and the offender should know that. If he reoffends in that period, he should expect to go back to court to be dealt with.
	My final general point relates to an issue that has been debated a great deal since the terrible killing of two young women on new year's eve in your part of the world, Madam Deputy Speaker. Those who carry knives or guns should absolutely expect to go away. Society has gone down the road so that people fuelled by drink or drugs often think that it is acceptable to carry such weapons. Ten years ago, they would have carried knives, but now it is more likely that they will carry guns. It is never acceptable to carry such weapons. There is a difference, however, between a 16-year-old who is given a gun to hold for 10 seconds while his cousin goes into a shop to pick up a newspaper and the 21-year-old who goes out carrying a machine gun as part of a gang. We must distinguish between the two, but the presumption should be that anyone who goes out armed and who is caught will lose his liberty.
	The messages must be clear. Anyone who is caught carrying a gun or a knife can expect to lose his liberty. Burglars who terrorise or intimidate people in their own homes should not expect to escape custody either. If we get the measures for such crimes right, dealing with low-level disorder will follow. We will be able to start work on the causes of criminal misbehaviour. As the right hon. Member for West Dorset rightly said, and as experience in New York and other places has shown, criminal behaviour often starts with children of five, six, seven or eight who live in disordered homes with bad parenting and no appropriate discipline at home.
	The test is whether the punishments are effective. Sometimes the better punishment is to provide an alternative that offers a good option for lawful activity. That does not necessarily mean locking someone up or treating him in a disciplinary fashion. Other options can be effective in dealing with crime and with the causes of crime if they are used to deal with people who are young when they start their criminal behaviour. We must send clear messages, but I fear that the messages sent in the past few months have been unclear. However, I believe that we could deal with that problem.

Oliver Letwin: The hon. Gentleman knows that there is considerable agreement between us on these matters, but has he considered the statistics that have persuaded me? Burglary is a premeditated crime and the statistics show that the imposition of custodial sentences appears to have had a very significant downward effect on the incidence of burglary as reported in the British crime survey figures and in the reported crime figures for burglary. How does he deal with that point?

Simon Hughes: I have considered those statistics and I accept that point. Interesting articles appeared in the press this weekend. For example, an article in The Sunday Times by Minette Marrin went through many alternative statistics on what works and what does not. It quoted a set of statistics that suggested that alternatives to custody had a higher success rate than custody. However, other statistics suggest that that is not the case and that the different options have a similar success or failure rate. I accept that there are different rates of success depending on the offence and on whether the alternative to custody was attached to drugs or alcohol treatment, but if we had a clearer idea about what works we would be able to make progress.
	I agree with the Home Secretary that we should criticise those who misrepresent the position. I share his view that, last week, the Leader of the Conservative Opposition and, surprisingly but to a lesser extent, his shadow Home Secretary appeared to get so carried away with the thought that this was a good issue for them that they misrepresented the facts. I do not often criticise the Conservative shadow Home Secretary as he is normally meticulous in his approach to these issues, but my one criticism of him today is that he appeared to show total amnesia when he described the figures published last Thursday as truly terrible. It was a total misrepresentation of the figures that have just been produced independently.
	I am not here to sell other people's products, but I commend the Home Office's statistical bulletin, which clearly sets out the trends. For example, it shows that domestic burglary reached its peak in 1994 and has since gone down or steadied and has not gone up again. For the Conservative motion to claim that the number of burglaries is going up flies completely in the face of the evidence in the bulletin.

Oliver Letwin: But it is.

Simon Hughes: Not according to the evidence. The right hon. Gentleman and I are not statisticians, but the figures are clear. All that has happened is that the recorded crime figures show a recent increase, but the British crime survey figures, which are more respected, show a decrease. I refer the right hon. Gentleman to page 6 of last week's document. He quoted from another part of it, so presumably we agree that the document is authentic.

Oliver Letwin: Of course I agree that the document is authentic, including page 10, from which I quoted. The problem is that the British crime survey is woefully deficient in two significant respects because it fails to deal with retail crime and multiple occupation. As a result, it does not tell us the same story as the reported crime figures, other than on a broad-brush scale over a long period. Is not it clear that even after the adjustments for the new reporting system, the reported crime statistics show a significant increase over the past year in domestic burglary and other burglaries?

Simon Hughes: I am keen to go outside and pore over the documents. I am willing to go by the work carried out by people who produce statistics independently on a regular basis. A big effort has been made to ensure that the statistics are more reliable and produced more frequently. If we want to reassure the public, it is better to concentrate on crimes, such as firearms crime, about which there can be no argument that they have increased. We should not frighten people about crimes, such as vehicle crime, if the evidence clearly shows that the trend is in the other direction.
	The right hon. Gentleman's party has an ongoing problem. Violent crime increased every year when it was in government. There were 2.5 million recorded crimes in 1979. That rose to 4.5 million in 1997, an increase of 81 per cent. The figure peaked at 5.5 million when the Conservatives were in government. In addition, the number of police officers, which had increased, decreased in their last five years in office, contrary to their promises. There were 469 fewer police officers in that period although the Government promised 5,000 more. In London, part of which I represent, there were 1,269 fewer officers. The number of convictions also fell from 1.8 million in 1979 to 1.4 million in 1996. In 1985, there was one conviction for every eight crimes; by 1997, there was only one conviction for every 14 crimes.
	The right hon. Gentleman will try to reinvent his party's policy on law and order, as he should do, but its record in office shows that it presided over an increasingly lawless society. In its last five years in government, police numbers decreased and crime increased, so he does not stand against the background of an effective alternative record when we judge his party's time in office. That is not his fault and I do not blame him personally, but the electorate need to take it into account. When they criticise the Government, which I am happy to do when they get it wrong, they also need to ensure that they do not forget what happened in those 18 years when the Conservatives got it badly wrong.

Vernon Coaker: I am pleased to say that the number of police officers in Nottinghamshire increased by 10 per cent. in the past three years. On statistics, however, does the hon. Gentleman agree that they are most effective when considered on a local basis? We need to make local statistics more easily available to local communities so that they can judge the effectiveness of the police or the crime prevention strategies in their communities. Surely the way to make communities more confident is to enable them to see the statistics for their own area.

Simon Hughes: Absolutely. My local police force could tell the hon. Gentleman that one of my beefs is that I perpetually say that it is no good merely producing statistics for the past quarter. It has to compare those with the previous quarter, last year and statistics for surrounding areas; otherwise they are meaningless. I have never understood why it is so difficult for the police to produce comparable statistics on a local basis. I simply cannot understand it. It is a great failing that, in the age of the computer, statistics and technology, comparable statistics cannot regularly be produced.
	My final points will, I hope, be encouraging. The Opposition may try to exploit statistics, but the reality is that although crime is far too high, overall crime has been falling since 1995, and violent crime has fallen in some years since then. It is troubling that there was, as the Home Secretary well knows, a huge increase in robberies between 1997 and 2001, and the most troubling statistics are those for reported firearms-related crimes, which is why the Government are right to act, although I am critical of the sequence of their actions.
	In 2001–02, firearms were used in 10,000 recorded crimes—a rise of 35 per cent. Airguns were used in more than 12,000 crimes, which is a rise of 21 per cent., and handguns were used in nearly 6,000 crimes, which is a rise of 46 per cent. We have to deal with knives and guns, but people are now terrified by guns, either because of an encounter with one or because of the fear of an encounter. That is partly why the figures show that so many adults, 35 per cent., believe that crime has increased a lot, and 34 per cent. believe that it has increased a little. Locally, they do not see sufficient police officers, and they do not yet see sufficient numbers of other people, such as neighbourhood wardens and community support officers, doing a policing job, so they do not yet feel that the system has law and order under control.

Vernon Coaker: rose—

Simon Hughes: If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I will continue; otherwise I will never get to the end of my speech and he will not have his chance to speak.
	When MORI, a perfectly reputable opinion polling company—it is based in my constituency, so I would probably have had to say that anyway—did its two-yearly survey of my borough, it asked people what they were most concerned about. The poll went through all the usual crimes, beginning with low-level antisocial behaviour, and asked people about their responses and planned reactions to those crimes. One problem, which is now apparent to us all, is that the public have lost confidence in the system's ability to deliver. When asked why they had not reported a crime to the police, 50 per cent. of people said that there was no chance of catching the criminals.
	Until we make the public believe that reporting a crime to the police will deliver a result, they will not have confidence that the criminal justice system works. I accept what the Met say they have done, although they have not done what they are represented as having done, but if somebody's home is burgled, a police officer should attend. The least that people can expect is that their home will be subject to proper policing and police support and advice. To send out someone who is not a police officer, or to send nobody, strikes me as an unacceptable response.
	Having made it clear that statistics must be true, I have also, I hope, made it clear that it is for Parliament to set maximum sentences but not specific sentences. Judges should do that, and just as judges must be autonomous if we are to have confidence in the judiciary, so the police must be autonomous. I share the Home Secretary's view expressed today on that, which is why Liberal Democrat Members have fought to resist Home Secretaries' interference with police authorities, commissioners and chief constables. There should be different responses in different places. What may work in Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire or Dorset, may not work for the Met, and we have to allow the police to respond to their local community. Judges may be criticised, but in my experience politicians command less respect than judges, and if we tried to usurp their role, we would be in trouble.
	I turn now to an idea in which I believe the Home Secretary will be interested, although I understand the personal difficulties in pursuing it. One reason that our justice system is dysfunctional is that we have three Departments running it—the Home Office, the Lord Chancellor's Department and the Law Officers Department. My party has long argued that we ought to follow the model of other countries and have a Ministry of Justice with a Secretary of State or Minister responsible, in the House of Commons, to elected representatives. There would then be a considerable chance of achieving a more co-ordinated set of policies, and we would not hear the Lord Chancellor saying something on the radio one day, followed by a Home Office Minister saying something different the next.
	I have argued that we must not have mandatory sentences. I think that they are wrong in all circumstances, but I hope that I have been clear in saying that we should debate the guidelines. I have also argued that we should very clear about the presumption of what should happen regarding gun use and about the sort of burglaries in respect of which people should expect to lose their liberty. However, the real danger of the war cry of the tabloids is that they are increasingly calling for prison for everything. Prison is the last card that can be played in the criminal justice system; there is no other. Once somebody has gone to prison, no bigger penalty can be used. When that card has been played, by definition, it loses its strength and efficacy.
	Alternatives can work. In Committee, the Solicitor-General has been proposing conditional cautions, with support from the Opposition parties, as an additional weapon in the armoury at the bottom of the scale of punishment. Where there are enough officers to do the job, the probation service is often very good at ensuring that alternatives work in the community. Earlier today, I was at Snaresbrook Crown court, which is the largest such court in England and Wales. The resident judge told me that Snaresbrook regularly has one probation officer for its 18, 19 or 20 courts. One day recently, however, it had no probation officer at all. If the Government do not proceed more quickly with the Chancellor's help to beef up the probation service, all the outside prison work will be at risk of being highly ineffective, instead of much more effective.
	I should like publicly to commend the Youth Justice Board. The Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport are right to draw attention to the programmes that it has been running in my constituency and elsewhere, which can divert energetic young people from criminal activity in the holidays and include all sorts of alternative activities that young people can do well, whether they involve drama, music or sport. We need more of those diversionary activities throughout the country.
	As Mr. Giuliani said in New York, one can make a difference, and a difference was made there. However, that requires more police, and I hope that the Home Secretary is now big enough to admit that one of the biggest mistakes that the Labour Government made after their election in 1997 was not to increase police numbers from the beginning. It is not only me who is saying that. The XNarrowing the Justice Gap" document produced by the Government states in very small print, under the title XRecent performance in bringing offences to justice",
	XBecause there are so many points in the criminal justice system where a justice gap may occur, when performance gets worse, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly why that has happened. The fall in police numbers in 1999–2000, which the Government has now reversed, is likely to account for at least part of the widening of the gap."
	I commend the Home Secretary for having record police numbers, which need to increase further, as he knows. However, it was a big mistake—it was not made under his stewardship of the Home Office—to let them decrease for the first three and half years of Labour government. If they had not done so, not nearly so many offences would have been committed and there would not be so much worry about crime.

Vernon Coaker: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. He is right to point to the welcome increase in police numbers and the fact that that should put more police on the street. Does he agree that we could consider how many extra police are on the street in relation to particular police forces? One police service with 2,000 officers might get 1,600 of them on to the street, while another with the same number might get 1,300 on to the street. Should not we consider that difference in performance and tell people how many operational officers they have got, as well as how many police officers?

Simon Hughes: Absolutely. Like the hon. Gentleman, all my hon. Friends with all their different police forces know that we need auditing, comparisons and the sharing of best practice. The reality is that merely having more police does not deliver results. It is what they do that counts. I have suggested, including to the Police Federation—it did not like my doing so—that civilians should be allowed to do any jobs that they are capable of doing. That could even include taking witness statements. Volunteers can work on the desk in a police station during the night. As I discovered when I stopped in Exeter once, a volunteer was perfectly able to do the job and could call a police officer if that were needed. Lots of jobs can be done in such a way. It is a question not only of more numbers, but of more numbers and more effective use.
	I am proud that we had an early neighbourhood warden scheme in Bermondsey. It has been in operation for a year and a bit and has been hugely effective in reducing graffiti, vandalism, antisocial behaviour, environmental damage and racist attacks. Members of the scheme have been able to do the work on the ground, thus releasing the police for other activities. That means that we are more effective across the board. Although I have argued about powers, I have always supported the family of the police.
	It is important that we do not change Ministers every two seconds and I therefore hope that the Home Secretary remains in post for the remainder of the Government's term of office. [Interruption.] I am serious about that. We need continuity.

David Heath: We do not say the same about the Lord Chancellor.

Simon Hughes: That comment does not need to be made more than once. But I ask the Home Secretary not to believe that an initiative a day keeps the criminal away. It does not. I hope that he will ensure that we aim for medium and long-term solutions, not short-term quick fixes. If the Prime Minister draws up an idea on the back of an envelope to catch people on a Friday night outside the pub, and delivers it in a lecture to academics in Tübingen, I hope that the Home Secretary ensures that it is examined, piloted and tested before it becomes policy—

David Cameron: And is subsequently ignored.

Simon Hughes: Indeed. If we had half the schemes and they were twice as effective, we would have done better than the record of the past four years shows. Labour Members and people outside share that view with Liberal Democrat Members.
	I hope that we can agree about statistics because we must take on the media distortion. I hope that we can agree about what works—that would be productive. I also hope that we can agree about good alternatives to custody and give them the necessary resources. I hope that we all realise that if young people get constructive things to do from their primary school, and if there are more male teachers, mentoring, good role models and much more sport, they have a much better chance of a productive life.
	My colleagues and I are not going to subscribe to talking up the crisis. The Conservative party is trying desperately to rescue itself and it therefore wants to make matters sound worse than they are. However, the weekend poll shows that eight out of 10 members of the public do not believe that the Government have law and order or crime under control. I hope that, from now on, the Government will lead the debate and therefore the media rather than following the media. There is a danger of government by headline; that is not the way to reduce crime. 5.22 pm

Ross Cranston: My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has no case to answer on the motion. I commend the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) for his dispassionate approach to the problem in his 36 minutes. I hope to adopt the same approach in my 10 minutes.
	Let me begin by dealing with the figures because the Opposition tabled their motion on that basis. The recorded crime figures involve what the police set down about crimes. Any first year criminology student can say that that depends on the way in which the figures are recorded and the recorders' behaviour. For example, it depends on whether control staff deal with calls in a specific way, the behaviour of the police and the public. The number of victims with insurance policies might drive up the reporting rate.
	The new national crime recording standard, which was introduced in April last year, tries to take a more objective view. It adopts a prima facie approach to reports from the public and takes what a person reports at face value even if there is no sound evidence that an offence has occurred. None the less, grave problems are attached to recorded crimes. Page 342 of the most recent edition of the XBritish Handbook of Criminology" states that
	Xvariations in recording practices can have such a great effect on the totals produced as to render 'face value' comparisons almost meaningless."
	As I said, the recorded crime figures have been used by the Opposition. There is no doubt that the figures for the 12 months until September 2002 show a 9 per cent. increase on those of the preceding 12 months, although when the changes introduced by the national crime recording standard are taken into account the increase is only 2 per cent. The figures for the quarter between July and September 2002 show a 1 per cent. fall if the NCRS changes introduced in April 2002 are taken into account.
	As the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey pointed out, the British crime survey involves asking people what crime they have experienced. I accept the shadow Home Secretary's point that that will not always represent all crime experienced—it may not take account of commercial burglary, for instance—but the important aspect is the 7 per cent. drop in all crime during the 12 months to September 2002. The BCS figures also show a 2 per cent. drop in violent crime, a 7 per cent. drop in domestic burglary and a 14 per cent.drop in vehicle theft. That is very good news. Nevertheless, even those figures show problems.
	As my time is limited, I will concentrate on firearms offences, especially in the light of the tragic deaths of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare in the west midlands conurbation. Fortunately my constituency does not experience gun crime, but—like your constituency, Madam Deputy Speaker—it is part of that conurbation, and it is worrying that those tragic deaths occurred in our region.
	According to the figures I have, firearms, excluding air weapons, were used in 9,974 recorded offences, an increase of 35 per cent. on the previous year. In 24 per cent. of those offences, the firearm was fired. Those statistics should be seen in perspective, and should be compared with what happens in other jurisdictions. The number of firearms deaths per 100,000 of the population varies from 26.6 in South Africa to 6.2 in the United States, 0.4 in Australia and 0.13 in the United Kingdom—although that last figure must be adjusted in the light of last week's figures.
	I have acknowledged that the total number of firearms offences has risen in each of the past four years, although I should point out to the Conservatives that the current figures are only slightly higher than an earlier peak in 1993. 100 deaths and 558 serious injuries in crimes involving firearms represents a serious problem. The deputy chief constable of the west midlands struck the right note the other day when he said, according to the Birmingham Post,
	XGun crime is increasing in many city areas and although it is still relatively rare, accounting for less than one per cent of all crime, it has devastating consequences . . . People are less likely to become the victim of crime in the West Midlands than they were last year or indeed for many years"
	I want to talk about three factors. The first is the guns themselves. We banned handguns, which obviously has not worked. According to a National Criminal Intelligence Service report picked up by some of the newspapers, many of the guns are coming from eastern Europe. Many are made in small back-street factories in Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia, and some have been bought on the internet.
	There is also the problem of replica firearms. Hon. Members will have read that the Manchester police recently seized nearly 1,800 replicas in a raid on three Manchester shops. The guns had been imported mainly from Italy. They fired blanks but could readily be adapted to shoot real bullets. There is also a problem of illegal firearms coming into the country through the post. Customs and Excise has found weapons hidden in parcels from a range of countries. Most are concealed alongside drugs. I welcome the measures taken by the Government to address the problem of guns. The national forensic firearms intelligence database will enable the Forensic Science Service to track the provenance of guns and ammunition more effectively, and there is also the possibility of an amnesty. We must, however, address the problem of guns getting into the country and being sold either by rogue dealers or through the internet.
	Who is using the weapons? Last week, I appeared on a media programme with a community activist in south London, Charles Bailey, who is also a producer of rap music. Charles explained to me that there had been an influx of people coming from Jamaica over the last 10 years, and that
	Xa certain element of them are a criminal element and they've seen us as soft targets."
	His explanation was that, whereas in the past local criminals might have targeted banks or building societies, they are now targeting drug dealers, because drug dealers have cash. So the dealers arm themselves and those committing an offence by trying to get money from them are arming themselves as well. The shadow Home Secretary rightly pointed out the other day that the drug culture is an important contributory factor in the gun culture, so we also have to address the problem of drugs.
	My third point relates to culture. There has been some discussion about violent video and computer games, and about rap music. I do not want to make a point about how they might contribute to the gun culture, but rap music can be used, as Charles Bailey explained to me, to counter the gun culture among young people. He is working with local authorities round the country to try to get young people away from the notion that violence is a good thing. I would commend to my hon. Friend the Minister Charles's latest rap CD, XDon't Shoot!". The Home Secretary will be as agitated as he was when he returned from Sheffield Wednesday's performance at the weekend when he listens to it, but I commend efforts such as this, in which young people can get the message that the violence associated with weapons is not a good thing.
	In conclusion, I agree that crime is a major social problem. Freedom from crime and from the fear of crime is as important for our constituents as improving standards in our schools and in the national health service. The figures demonstrate, however, that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the Government are doing a good job, and the assertions in the Opposition motion are largely fantasy.

Edward Garnier: I agree with earlier remarks that the sooner the criminal law is codified, the sooner we will stop having these debates, because it will be so much easier for the Home Secretary of the day to understand what the law is, without having to leap unadvised, or ill-advisedly, on to the media.
	I do not want to spoil the very good speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), but I urge some caution on him in relation to sentencing guidelines. It seems to me from my experience—I sit as a Crown court recorder, although my practice as a barrister is entirely in the civil sphere—that the flexibility given to the guidelines by having them designed or promulgated by the Court of Appeal is far greater than that which would be achieved by having them set by the House of Commons.
	Parliament is usually several years out of date when it comes to discuss any particular criminal justice problem. It may be that we have a difference of language and that my right hon. Friend is not proposing that the House of Commons should play quite the same role as the Court of Appeal, criminal division. Anyhow, I urge a little caution there.

Henry Bellingham: Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that burglary sentencing was going quite well and that it was unnecessary for the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor to intervene?

Edward Garnier: That involves two different problems. I do not know whether my hon. Friend has read the judgment issued just before Christmas by the Lord Chief Justice in the two cases that have caused the controversy, but it is well worth reading.

Henry Bellingham: I shall read it.

Edward Garnier: I am sure that my hon. Friend, as an assiduous studier of these matters, will rush to the Library and do so.
	The recent shootings in Birmingham have brought once again to public focus a particular aspect of the criminal justice system—namely, gun crime. It is right that we are turning our attention to it once again in the House, although I am not sure, as other speakers have suggested, that the Government's response to those shootings has been thought through coherently.
	As my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said, the Government are notorious for their love of a good headline. Indeed, the Prime Minister desperately pleaded with his staff in the last Parliament to find him eye-catching initiatives with which he could be personally associated. Lately, he has had to contend with an eye-catching Lord Chancellor and a Lord Chief Justice—two figures at the very top of the judicial tree who are not quite so adept at anticipating the consequences of interviews with the press as he would like.
	The Prime Minister, of course, wants to be seen as leading a Government who are tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime; one of his glibber little phrases that was so pleasing to the eye and the ear when invented and first spoken, but which has returned to haunt him again and again as the public have come to realise that he and his Ministers have done nothing of substance to make this a safer country to live in.
	The Government have promised much and delivered little in a vast swathe of public policy areas, but in the sphere of criminal justice that criticism is particularly accurate. Much of their failure has been entirely of their own making. We have a Home Secretary who celebrates his antipathy to judges and lawyers—the very people who work hard to make the criminal justice system work—and we know that he is a reasonably canny operator who never says anything without having first worked out whether it will resonate well with his chosen audience.
	That is all, I suppose, the stuff of politics and one should neither be too surprised nor too precious about the approach of the Home Secretary or of the entire Government to public discussion of their failures, but I sometimes think that they would not be in such a muddle if the Government had occasionally thought before putting their spin machine into operation. The desire to fill the available air time or newspaper page has led them to believe that the announcement is the answer and that the soundbite is the substance.
	To identify a target is to hit it in the bull's-eye, so we had last week two conflicting messages and a lot of tongue-tied and confused junior Ministers trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. We must have tough new minimum sentences for gun crime, but we must not send burglars to prison.
	May I deal briefly with the second of those two issues? All criminal sentencing is based on both the offence and the offender. The first-time defendant is likely to receive a lesser sentence than a defendant on a similar charge who is back for his third or fourth offence. First-time burglars, be they burglars of domestic or business premises, are not sent to prison if at all possible because sentencers realise that jail is not always the answer to the defendant's problems, albeit that prison is likely where the victim would like him to go.
	The Lord Chancellor's remarks on the XToday" programme were, frankly, fatuous and an object lesson in that it is better to say nothing if one has nothing sensible to say. Repeat, professional burglars must go to prison, because, to put it at its lowest, they are a public nuisance. If there are insufficient prison places, the Government must provide more temporary or permanent ones. They should not go on the radio to tell the public that their concerns about burglary and its consequences for the home owner and his family are exaggerated or misplaced.
	As for the five-year minimum sentence for gun criminals, yet again I fear that the Home Secretary said what he thought would go down well in a saloon bar, but failed to recognise what is already happening in the courts. It is hardly surprising that he has had to step back. Had he taken the trouble to find out what the courts are already doing he might not be in the mess in which he now finds himself. The offences and the penalties associated with them are set out in the Firearms Act 1968, the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1994 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. The existing penalties range from non-custodial sentences to life imprisonment and, in appropriate cases, the courts have imposed lengthy prison terms.
	However, the number of years' penalty determined by statute does not deter the criminal. By and large, if he thinks about the long-term consequences of his actions at all, he does not believe that he will ever be caught. Announcing new minimum sentences merely makes the politicians think that they are doing something positive, whereas what is needed is a vastly better resourced and increased police force, Customs and Excise service and intelligence service, and far greater co-operation between our drugs and gun-crime teams and those overseas. If #1 million is spent on diverting drug-crop farmers in south America or Asia, that is far more productive than spending the equivalent sum on the criminal justice system here to deal with the gangs, the guns and the dealers.
	However, that is not to underestimate the problem that we face. The unlawful possession and use of firearms has long been recognised as a grave source of danger to society. The reasons are obvious—firearms may be used to take life, cause serious injury or further the commission of other serious crimes. Often the victims are those charged with enforcing the law or the protection of persons or property. In conflicts between competing criminal gangs, often related to the supply of drugs, the use and possession of firearms provoke an escalating spiral of violence. When imitation firearms are used, the risk to life and limb is absent, but those weapons are often used to frighten and intimidate victims to reinforce unlawful demands. It is often hard to distinguish them from the real thing—for practical purposes, it is impossible in the circumstances in which they are used. Victims are usually as frightened and intimidated as they would be if genuine firearms had been used, and are often isolated and vulnerable. Sometimes, genuine firearms are disabled and cannot be fired, or cannot be fired for want of ammunition. In those cases, the risk to life and limb is again absent, but the use of the weapon to frighten or intimidate remains, and it may be used in earnest on another occasion.
	The appropriate sentence for a firearms offence, as for any other offence, depends on all the facts and circumstances relevant to the offence and the offender. It will, however, usually be appropriate for the sentencing court to ask a series of questions. First, what sort of weapon is involved? Genuine firearms are more dangerous than imitation ones; loaded firearms are more dangerous than unloaded ones; unloaded firearms for which ammunition is available are more dangerous than firearms for which no ammunition is available. Possession of a firearm that has no lawful use, such as a sawn-off shotgun, will be viewed even more seriously than possession of a firearm that can be used lawfully. Secondly, what, if any, use has been made of the firearm? The more prolonged, premeditated and violent the use, the more serious the offence is likely to be. Thirdly, with what intention, if any, has the defendant possessed or used the firearm? Clearly, the more serious the intended act, the more serious the offence. Fourthly, what is the defendant's record? The seriousness of any firearms offence is inevitably greater if the offender has an established record of committing firearms offences or violent crimes.
	The cases decided in the Court of Appeal are diverse in nature. Any rigid and formulaic approach to sentencing could produce injustice in some cases. Even offences which, on the face of it, appear to be very grave may, on examination, turn out to be less so. Given both the clear public need to discourage the unlawful possession and use of firearms, whether real or imitation, and Parliament's intention, expressed in a continuing increase in maximum penalties, the courts should treat any firearms offence as serious—and they do. It is fair to say that some sentences imposed for such offences in the past have failed to reflect their seriousness and the justifiable public concern that they arouse. Save for minor infringements, which may be properly dealt with summarily, firearms offences almost invariably merit custodial terms, even on a guilty plea and in the case of an offender with no previous record.
	When the courts deal with serious offences under the legislation, the custodial term is likely to be of a considerable length. When the four questions that I have posed yield adverse answers for the offender, terms at or approaching the maximum may, in a contested case, be appropriate. We do not need more legislation to deal with gun crime but the sensible application of existing law and clarity of approach from the Government. I urge them not to rush to the newspapers and media studios to sound off the latest half-witted saloon bar idea that comes into their head. They should ask their advisers what the law is and how it is being applied, and if it is being applied sensibly they should leave it alone. We have far too much legislation mucking up the criminal justice system and confusing the courts. The Minister is a man of integrity and common sense, and I urge him to take that lesson back to his masters.

David Kidney: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), who brings to the debate the perspective of today's sentencing judges. If he reflects judges' attitudes accurately, I would say gently to him that there is a little bit of complacency on the part of the Bench in relation to their role in assuring the public that everything is under control. The motion talks about the honest citizen's feeling of helplessness. It is fashionable to blame all woes on the Government, but as a constituency Member I hear complaints against the police, the prosecutors and, indeed, the judges. The feeling of helplessness has more than one source.
	Before I begin citing statistics, let me make it clear that I never lose sight of the human effect of crime. Clearly, in serious crimes such as homicide people lose their lives and families lose loved ones, and crimes involving guns, violence or sexual assault can create an enormous amount of misery. We should remember that when we consider the dry statistics.
	Today's debate is based on figures from the Home Office statistical bulletin No. 2 of 2003. The hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) praised the accuracy and good work of the Home Office statistical unit. The figures show that the trend in overall crime continued to be flat up to September 2002, showing little difference from the year up to March 2002. That picture of crime neither going up nor down over 18 months or so is allied to the British crime survey picture of all crime having diminished by more than a quarter since 1997, which is a pretty happy picture, not a miserable one, even though we can all say that crime is still too high and more measures are needed to drive it down further. This is certainly not a crisis.
	It is easy for people to pick out the statistics that show a worse picture than the others. That is what the media did last week and what the motion is based on.

William Cash: Will the hon. Gentleman, whose constituency is adjacent to mine, confirm that, according to the figures for 2001–02, sexual offences in the Stafford area have increased by 42.4 per cent., and burglary from dwellings by 16 per cent? That certainly does not sound very good to me.

David Kidney: In the words of Ronald Reagan, there he goes again: the hon. Gentleman has picked out the statistics that show the worst picture. I pay great tribute to Staffordshire police and the agencies with which they have worked in partnership, because they have taken sexual offences and domestic violence very seriously and have encouraged the public to trust them and report such crimes in greater numbers. The increase in the statistics is partly the result of increased reporting of crime that was happening in any case, because people trust the police more.
	That brings me to the reliability of one set of statistics. In April 2002, those police forces that were not already doing so agreed to adopt the national crime recording standard and started to record figures more accurately for the crimes that were reported to them. That is bound to create a difference, probably for a couple of years, and I warn people not to take too much account of one set of reported crime figures until they have bedded down correctly and accurately.
	In support of that warning, I want to talk about the situation of Staffordshire police. While some reported crime has shown an increase in the quarter up to September 2002, Staffordshire police were able to announce, for the six months up to September 2002, that crime fell in their area by 8.8 per cent., putting Staffordshire at the top of the national crime reduction league table. In key priority areas, crime fell: burglaries dropped by 20 per cent.—the third biggest national reduction in this type of crime—and there was an overall decrease in vehicle crime of 24 per cent. There were also smaller falls in incidents of public disorder and nuisance complaints. In addition, the detection rate improved, jumping to 30 per cent., against a national average of 22 per cent.
	Those are startlingly good figures, and I expect Members to listen raptly as I tell them Staffordshire's secret so that they can duplicate it in their constituencies. The truth is that there is no secret: Staffordshire adopted the new Xethical", or victim-focused, method of crime recording two years earlier than the rest of the country. Because we recorded more crime, we experienced an apparently big increase in crime two years before everybody else, and the Staffordshire police force was panned for those big increases. We appeared in The Observer as the fifth worst performing police force in the country, and yet just 12 months later, everybody else has adopted that method of recording figures. We have worked through those figures and maintained a steady sea, as it were. Now, we are somewhere near the top of the best performing police authorities in the country.
	That is not to belittle the efforts of all who have played their part in Staffordshire's good performance. The force is very well led by the chief constable John Giffard and his astute senior officers. All the officers are committed to their work, and they are supported by a large civilian work force that does dedicated work on their behalf. So everyone deserves credit for those figures, which show that the police are doing well.
	Nor are the police sitting on their laurels. This year, we are introducing a system of 219 designated community beat officers, whose job is to be seen on the ground and to talk to local community members, thereby picking up the street intelligence to which the shadow Home Secretary referred. Staffordshire is also slightly ahead of the game in terms of changing shift patterns to try to match police numbers and police presence to the places and times at which crimes are known to be committed. Indeed, the Police Reform Act 2002 has tried to establish that principle across the whole country. So the police are doing all the right things, and when we are satisfied that that is so, our job as politicians is to call for the public to support them. For me, that is the message that we should be sending through this debate.
	That is the statistical argument, and I am glad that other Members have accepted that, in statistical terms, more police officers are engaged in police work throughout the country than ever before in our history. That is a useful tool in the fight against crime, but there is more to that fight than policing. We should also consider the effectiveness of the prosecution service, and of the rest of the criminal justice system. That is why we are trying to make changes to ensure that every component of that system plays its part in reassuring the public about crime.
	An announcement has recently been made concerning mandatory five-year sentences for gun crime, and I want to say something about the reporting of such announcements. When the British crime survey released its quarterly statistics on reported crime, the media picked out the worst parts. They are entitled to do so, but I did not hear many of them balance that by pointing out that crime was flat overall.

Dominic Grieve: Surely one problem is that the Government played exactly the same game in reverse in respect of street crime. They can hardly be surprised if people apply the same importance to quarterly statistics as Ministers apply to street crime statistics.

David Kidney: I am not attempting to pick out the best statistics to enable Labour to justify the current situation; I am making a plea—the hon. Gentleman will have heard me make it a moment ago—for people to show patience over time, so that we can see how the trends develop rather than focusing on one set of statistics. I am not particularly interested in playing that game with the hon. Gentleman.
	My point is that, just as the media picked out the dramatic aspects of last week's figures, so when the announcement was made that the Home Secretary intended to table an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill—the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and I are currently deliberating that Bill in Committee—the media reported that announcement as the Home Secretary's changing the law by introducing five-year mandatory sentences. That plainly was not right. When the judges responded the next day by saying that there should be exceptions so that they can continue to use their judicial discretion, and the Home Secretary agreed, the headlines were, XHome Secretary does U-turn and changes the law". The truth is that we have yet even to debate either of those propositions.

Dominic Grieve: The hon. Gentleman highlights one of our precise criticisms of the Government. Even after the Home Secretary accepted that mandatory sentences for firearms offences were not really what had been proposed, last Wednesday the Prime Minister repeated at the Dispatch Box a reference to mandatory five-year sentences for firearms offences—presumably precisely because he wanted to see that copy in the newspaper the following day. So again, the Government can hardly complain about the way in which they are reported, because that is exactly the spin that they themselves have tried to engineer, in order to cover discussion of the true nature of the problem.

David Kidney: I do not accept that it is spin; I regard it as inaccurate reporting of that announcement. There will be a discussion in Committee about an amendment to introduce mandatory sentences, and the hon. Gentleman and I will be among the first to have it.
	The final important aspect that I want to mention is the effect on the mind of the public, and the reference in the Opposition motion to the
	Xsense of helplessness of the . . . citizen".
	The British crime survey tells us that a majority of the public still feel that crime is rising, even though it is in fact stable and has fallen for five years or more. We need to deal with that by addressing the public's concerns. Despite the seriousness of homicide, gun crime, violence, sexual offending and so on, what affects people most in their day-to-day lives is antisocial behaviour. As we debate serious matters such as gun crime, we must not lose sight of the fact that day-to-day issues such as antisocial behaviour still need to be tackled, and that is what we are going to do in this Session. 5.57 pm

Henry Bellingham: I congratulate the shadow Home Secretary on his excellent speech. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney), who made a thoughtful and well-informed contribution.
	A lot has been said about the comments of Lord Woolf and the Lord Chancellor, both of whom have shown that they are completely out of touch. Burglary is never a victimless crime. It often involves the threat or fact of physical attack, and many victims are permanently traumatised. Many move home because, once their home and their prized possessions have been violated, they feel unable to stay in the same place. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary made clear, the figures are rising at an alarming rate. In the year to September, burglaries were up by 8 per cent. to nearly 500,000. Robberies were up by 13 per cent., and firearms offences by 35 per cent. Handguns are now used in 5,800 crimes—a rise of some 46 per cent.
	We must have proper deterrents, and I really do feel that the statements by Lord Chief Justice Woolf and the Lord Chancellor are totally at odds with public opinion. The shadow Home Secretary made it clear that there is overwhelming evidence that custodial sentences for burglary do indeed deter. In looking at the new guidelines, we should note that a couple of cases have already shown clearly how much damage is being done. In an intervention, I referred to the case of Gary Callaby, who lives in west Norfolk. He admitted to three offences, including one of burglary and one of theft, and asked for four other offences of burglary to be taken into consideration. They were not minor burglaries. The first involved stealing a quantity of food and compact discs from Park lane, in Helhoughton; the second involved a break-in and the theft of #1,500-worth of property in West Raynham; the third, occurring four days after the second, involved the theft of a jewellery box and jewellery worth #1,500 from Weasenham. A few weeks later, Gary Callaby stole a number of fittings and other equipment from West Raynham farm.
	That person committed three burglaries and one theft; in court he admitted four other offences of burglary which he asked to be taken into consideration. Judge Darroch made it clear that he felt a custodial sentence was the only answer. However, he said:
	XIf the latest decision had not come out, it would have been a prison sentence.
	These are very serious offences, and in my view there are two particularly aggravating features: One, they occurred over a period of time, and two, you misused information obtained from customers."
	This man was a painter and decorator; he used insider knowledge of the particular homes and the families whose trust he betrayed when he burgled them. That case rightly gave rise to a great deal of local and national coverage.
	Another case since then involved the Crocker family who live at Bedlington in Northumberland. A burglar broke into their house and tried to stab Mrs. Crocker with a kitchen knife. Fortunately, he was overcome and the police were called. He came up in court two or three days ago and has escaped a prison sentence, much to the dismay and anger of the victims.
	Damage is being done, and I feel strongly, as do many of my right hon. and hon. Friends, that Lord Woolf must move into the real world. An overwhelming number of people in my constituency believe that he is out of touch; I have had very many letters on the subject.
	I have had even more letters on the case of my famous constituent, Tony Martin, who is due to come out of prison next week. The facts of his case are well documented. He was a victim of crime; what happened was an appalling tragedy for him and for the people who were killed and injured. He has made it clear that when he comes out of prison, he will campaign for the victims of burglary. He will also push very hard for changes in the law on exactly what householders can do to defend their property.
	Rural police forces up and down the country are overstretched. Burglars know this and they are targeting homes in my constituency and in those of my hon. Friends the Members for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow), for Witney (Mr. Cameron) and for Stone (Mr. Cash). People in rural areas feel particularly vulnerable. Their natural instinct is to protect themselves. The law clearly states that one can use reasonable force, but recent cases have resulted in total confusion. Tony Martin fired at someone who was facing away from him and shot him in the back. A man was recently convicted for repeatedly stabbing a burglar who had broken into the flat where he believed his children were sleeping. However, when a householder stabbed to death one intruder and seriously wounded another, the Crown Prosecution Service found that the force used was reasonable and did not prosecute. Clearly the CPS cannot decide where the boundary between reasonable and unreasonable force lies and what the law actually is.
	How can it be right to prosecute people when the law is confused and contradictory? If lawyers, safe in their offices, cannot work out what is right, how can the householder be expected to weigh up the pros and cons in the middle of a violent struggle in the dark? Is it reasonable to expect that same householder, during a few fearful seconds on the stairs when he is being menaced by broken bottles, to guess what the law would say when lawyers themselves do not know?
	We do not want new, over-prescriptive laws; we certainly do not want a firearms free-for-all, but we need a much more sympathetic approach by the police and the CPS towards householders who defend themselves. There needs to be a presumption in favour of their innocence rather than the other way round, which appears to be the case at present. There needs to be a presumption against further prosecutions. I am not suggesting that the Government should immediately change the law, but we should have a report from the Law Commission. It should be tasked with examining whether we need a new law whereby the relevant test is not based on the Xreasonable man" but a new, subjective test of what the householder believes to be appropriate at the time. That would allow for the fact that every case is different and every set of circumstances unique. As a result, householders would not be prosecuted unless they were launching revenge attacks on burglars.
	There is a strong feeling in west Norfolk in particular that burglars who enter properties should leave their civil rights outside. That, too, needs to be addressed by the Law Commission. At present, burglars and robbers can profit from their crimes if injured, which is ludicrous. Brendon Fearon, who was injured during the burglary of Tony Martin's property, applied for legal aid, and tried to sue Tony Martin for damages and loss of earnings.
	I am not advocating American-style laws with people being shot for trespassing into gardens to retrieve footballs. However, homeowners and householders need to know that they can defend themselves. That would send a clear message to members of the criminal fraternity that if they enter other people's property, they do so at their peril. That would be a significant step forward in the fight against crime, which every party is rightly determined to win.

Vera Baird: The hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) talked about the dangers of trying to understand crime by headlines. I suggest that this debate has been brought about by headlines, and misunderstood headlines at that. No sooner is there a headline about burglary and a difference in emphasis about what should happen to burglars than there is a debate demanding that the whole criminal justice system be saved from what is perceived as the brink of collapse.
	Even the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) could not sustain his scream of outrage at the outset of his speech. He concedes that there must be guidelines on sentencing and that judges must individualise the sentence in the specific case. In that situation, it is inevitable that some burglars will not go into custody. The right hon. Gentleman would not, I am sure, send to prison a 12-year-old who entered an empty house to steal scrap. He would not sentence a man of 16 or 17 who had committed that kind of burglary to prison, particularly if he had a drugs problem that could be dealt with far more adequately by a drug treatment and testing order. So the scream of outrage cannot even be sustained by the Conservative Front Bench.
	The criminal justice system is not just about burglary, important as that is, but about many more offences. Let us consider what the Conservatives did regarding two offences in which I am particularly interested. Home Office figures for 1985 showed that convictions for rape stood at 25 per cent. By the mid-1990s, the figure was 9 per cent. The Tories were firmly at the helm for all that time. What did they do about that? After all, it is of great concern to women. The evidence shows that one in four or five women is raped or sexually assaulted. With the Tories firmly at the helm, the conviction rate hurtled down a banana slide to next to nothing. What did they do?
	The Tories had the perfect opportunity to legislate in the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996. It has been well known in many circles for many years that the admission of previous sexual history is a massive deterrent for women to come forward and a huge block on them sustaining a prosecution when they have started. This is not about upping conviction rates but about the core of what the criminal justice system should do for victims—giving them support so that they have the confidence to come to court, do themselves justice and let a jury decide.
	The admission of previous sexual history put the complainant on trial instead of the defendant, and women were discouraged. It is in all ways irrelevant to the issue before the jury in 90 per cent. of cases. Research shows that in so far as previous sexual history comes into a trial about a complainant, the jury's conception of the guilt of the defendant declines. That is true even if the woman or man complainant denies every bit of it. In other words, it contributed to wrongful acquittals.
	The Tories had the opportunity to legislate in the 1996 Act. Did they make any attempt to help with the vast decline in rape convictions at that stage? Was there any mention of it in any aspect of Tory debate on the matter? None whatever. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, then in Opposition, introduced an amendment to that Bill to limit the admission of previous sexual history and to exclude it from being introduced to show consent. She and the then shadow Home Secretary, now my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, had, unlike the Tory Government, consulted survivors and practitioners, of which I was one, and they know of the importance of that amendment. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport set out then everything that I have said now, but the Conservative Government simply voted it down. They were not interested in stopping the decline in the conviction rate.

Dominic Grieve: Will the hon. and learned Member give way?

Vera Baird: I will in a moment.
	Change has since been enacted, and it is having an effect. Since 1999 no previous sexual history has been admissible to show consent. I suggest that when the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) stands up, he should apologise to those rape complainants who had to be cross-examined needlessly about their sexual past during the intervening three years between the Conservative failure to act and our acceptance of responsibility. Will he consider doing that?

Dominic Grieve: I will not. I have two things to say. First, notwithstanding the amendment to which the hon. and learned Lady refers, the rate of conviction remains very low, as she is aware. Secondly, I am sure that a legitimate point was made at the time about concern that any change in the law should still ensure that a fair trial could take place, and I am sure that she was alive to that.

Vera Baird: The reason given for rejecting the amendment at that time was that existing provision was perfectly adequate. In other words, the old law, which had repeatedly since the 1970s allowed previous sexual history to go into court, was considered perfectly sufficient and women's complaints were put at naught. There was little mention then of the other issues that the hon. Gentleman now raises.
	In addition to making an important change, the Labour Government have conducted a sex offences review, XSetting the Boundaries", they have produced a White Paper, XProtecting the Public", and they propose legislation. In addition, specialist prosecutors for rape now exist so that proper concentration may be placed on the issues in the case. Did the Tories take any of those fairly obvious measures, which are bound to be effective? They did not.
	Codes of practice are in place for how the police and the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with rape. Did the Tories introduce any such thing? Not at all. There is a power for the Attorney-General to challenge unduly lenient sentences, which were a further reason why women did not come forward. Small sentences were insufficient satisfaction for women who managed to sustain their complaints. Did the Tory Government try systematically to use that power in the aid of rape victims? No, they did not.

David Cameron: I know that I am going back into ancient history, but the hon. and learned Lady will find that the power to challenge lenient sentences was introduced by the Conservatives and opposed by Labour.

Vera Baird: The hon. Gentleman will find that the Tory Government made no attempt at any stage to use that power to come to the assistance of women rape complainants in the way that the current Attorney-General has systematically done over the past few months. His action has resulted in clear and helpful decisions for women: for example, in sentencing for culpability, no distinction should be made between a rape carried out by a stranger and a rape carried out by an intimate. That important principle could have been established 10 years ago if the Tory Government had had the slightest interest in an issue of high concern to women.
	I acknowledge what the hon. Member for Beaconsfield said about the conviction rate still being poor. It takes a long time for crime figures to come into the system and I have been trying, preparatory to consultation on sex offences, to carry out as best I can a survey to see what is happening. Chief Inspector Walton from Project Sapphire, the highly successful Metropolitan police unit at the forefront of dealing with rape, is pretty sure that conviction figures are improving. He told me last Wednesday that it is still too early to prove that, but that he knows more cases are coming to court. I had a meeting at the University of Teesside last Friday with people from my local rape crisis centre and women's support network. The women I met also know that more cases are coming to court and that more convictions are being sustained because the Government, unlike their predecessor, are tackling that aspect of criminal justice.
	Another aspect of the criminal justice system that received not a mention among the screams from the Opposition Front Bench was domestic violence. One quarter of all violent crime is domestic violence. One woman in four will experience it in her lifetime. The police receive a 999 call every minute about domestic violence. Between one quarter and one third of homicide victims are killed by a partner or former partner. The impact on children is monumental. The last domestic violence legislation was introduced in 1976, in the dying days of the Wilson Government by the then hon. Member for Barking, Jo Richardson. For 18 years was anything significant done by the Tories about domestic violence? I suggest that there was nothing whatsoever.
	When Labour came into office, there was a White Paper within months. There is now a ministerial group, and a specialist cross-departmental domestic violence unit that is recruiting an experienced head. It intends to increase safe accommodation choices for victims of domestic violence, and that is in progress, and it is getting health care initiatives under way and improving the interface between civil and criminal law so that one court knows what another court is doing about domestic violence. It is ensuring that the police and the CPS, who are committed to best practice, play a supportive role. Now domestic violence cases can be prosecuted without the need for a victim to give evidence. A national network of domestic violence specialists co-ordinates prosecution policies. Did the Tories do any of that? They did not.
	Every domestic violence murder is now the subject of an inquiry to try to ascertain just where the risk factors should have been picked up to stop the case from escalating to its appalling conclusion. The Government have gone out to consultation and there will be domestic violence legislation, a free-standing Bill that will allow scope for amendments and expansion. That Bill has been announced well ahead of its passage, and there will be consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny with every prospect of significant steps forward in solving the epidemic of domestic violence crime that is not even mentioned by Conservative Members when they call a debate about the criminal justice system.
	I hope that the Conservatives will not, as they did with changes to rape law, oppose changes in domestic violence law. I have some hope. Domestic violence was not even debated at a Conservative party conference until this year, and I am pleased that a debate has happened. I hope that the Tories are turning the corner and will come along with us.
	To the right hon. and hon. Gentlemen on the Opposition Benches who were rash enough to summon this debate, I must say that women are in no doubt about who failed to deliver on rape and on domestic violence. They are in no doubt about who is trying to assist them now.
	I have spoken of specific items and shall widen my speech for one minute. I shall go to Eston in Redcar two weeks on Friday to talk about crime and community safety. When I walk in, people will say to me that more needs to be done. They will add, however, that they are glad to talk to me rather than to a representative of the previous Government, during whose period in office recorded crime doubled—including that in my constituency—and the number of criminals convicted by the courts fell by a third. During that time, the chance of being a victim of violent crime trebled—including in my constituency—and crime increased faster than it did in any other western country. I can return to the source of the debate by saying that the chances of being a victim of burglary increased from one in 32 to one in 13 over the Conservative period in office. They criticise us, but we may ask whether they were generally effective on crime. The answer is no.
	The two gender hate crimes of high concern to women were not even on the field of play during those years. Thank goodness that the Labour Government are not only on the field, but scoring good goals.

William Cash: I rise to speak in my role as a Back-Bench Member on a matter of intense importance not only to my constituents, but to the public at large.
	When the Lord Chancellor was interviewed on the XToday" programme a week ago, I was astonished to hear him say that first-time offenders should be sent to prison only as a last resort. As I pointed out in this place, it had apparently been agreed between him, the Home Secretary and the Attorney-General that, in general, that methodology would be employed even for serious offences.
	Having criticised the tabloid newspapers for presuming to comment on such questions, the Lord Chancellor went on to assert that the people of this country were not so unworldly as to disagree with what he had to say. However, a west midlands newspaper, the Express & Star, held a poll a few days after the Lord Chancellor made his comments and I was asked to comment on the fact that no less than 98 per cent. of the respondents disagreed with his analysis and thus, by implication, that of the Lord Chief Justice as well. Furthermore, in a poll taken by The People on 12 January, 93 per cent. of people said that they want burglars to be locked up for a second or third offence rather than being given community sentences.
	One of the lessons to be learned from all that is that it is extremely important that our senior Law Officers and judges should have regard—as politicians do—to public opinion. Those extraordinary percentages suggest that the Lord Chancellor was entirely wrong, not only in what he said but in the way that he said it. I suspect that the publication of newspaper reports about the guidelines has, in effect, suggested to burglars that they have been given a green signal.
	One cannot draw criminological or academic conclusions about the construction of such guidelines because no one reads them, except to extract a few bits and pieces—as I shall do myself. I am extremely sceptical as to their value. When I was asked for my comments on them last week, I said that it would be better to put much greater emphasis on the judge's discretion—as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) also suggested. Furthermore, there should be much more parliamentary supervision or surveillance of such things. The law and political developments in the law should be kept in kilter with the needs of the times in which we live and with public opinion.
	I have read the guidelines with great care and I am deeply concerned about the emphasis in interviews with Law Officers and in the guidelines themselves that the reason for what is being done is to deal with overcrowding in prisons. There is a severe danger that judicial guidelines, which should be dealing with questions of justice, are actually being used for political purposes. The Lord Chief Justice may not have realised that, but the unelected Lord Chancellor should certainly have done so and should not have associated himself with the tendency to focus on the question of prison populations.
	It is part of my job to read the guidelines, but I would not criticise hon. Members for not having done so. However, if they have, they will have been astonished to note that paragraph 10 states:
	XThe pressures on our prisons and the extent to which it is possible to address an offender's criminal behaviour during a prison sentence are not matters of which the public can be expected to be aware."
	That is an extraordinary comment of great complacency. Indeed, it is somewhat contemptuous of the public at large—to return to the point that I made earlier about the mismatch between public opinion and sentencing policy, especially on burglary.
	The guidelines send out hugely confused and contradictory messages, but there is a bottom line. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary suggested, it relates to the fact that, in the last resort, judges should be allowed to make their own decisions. Paragraph 19 states:
	XThe width of the definition of burglary in section 9 of the Theft Act 1968 underlines the fact that the court can do no more than provide guidelines. The application of the guidelines must be subject to all the circumstances of the particular case and sentencers in applying the guidelines must tailor their sentence to meet those circumstances."
	To put it simply, that means that after considering all the facts of the case—as I hope any judge would—the sentencer considers the law and uses their discretion in reaching a verdict.
	There are serious questions as to the value of the guidelines. They create a theatre in which we shall see judicial dancing on the head of a pin, whereas I should be happier if much more emphasis was put on the discretion of the judge. I have faith in our judiciary, if it is given an opportunity. My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) referred to a judge who felt constrained by the guidelines. One could enlarge on that example, although I do not intend to do so this evening.
	In a burglary, the most important fact is that of entry—no one knows what is going to happen after that. For example, in the Tony Martin case, with which I am not familiar in detail, things happened as a result of the burglary. We have heard ideas such as the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) about the burglar being able to guess that someone was in the house. However, the burglar does not, and cannot, know about that and we have to deal with the physical reaction that might result.
	It is wrong for the guidelines to suggest that there should be a presumption against prison. There should be a presumption in favour of prison, but extenuating circumstances should be taken into account and it should be left to our judges to form their own judgment in the courts. That would be a sensible way to proceed and I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset for his suggestion that such matters should be properly discussed in Parliament. They should already have been considered in this place and most people are astonished that that was not the case.

Ian Lucas: I should like to focus my brief remarks on the statement in the Opposition motion that the Government have an
	Xapparent inability . . . to provide a coherent, long-term strategy to resolve"
	the problems of crime. I profoundly disagree with that statement because I believe that when the Government took office in 1997 there was a major change in the approach to crime in our communities. The key word is Xcommunity". It is much over-used, but, importantly, it was recognised from the outset that crime is a community issue.
	Another hackneyed phrase is Xtough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". It may be a soundbite, but it has a resonance. It was important because it expressed our constituents' knowledge that crime cannot be confronted simply by sentencing criminals. Crime is a community issue that needs to be confronted jointly by all the organisations in our communities, and that has happened since Labour took office in 1997.
	We have had the introduction, for example, of crime and disorder partnerships and young offenders teams, both of which are highly respected throughout the criminal justice system. They reintroduced the role of local authorities, of which the Conservative party appeared to have a pathological hatred in the years leading up to 1997, to the extent that it would simply not recognise the fact that they had an important role in dealing with crime.
	Whenever I speak to those involved in the criminal justice system in my community—from the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the probation service to defence solicitors—they all praise the structure that has been set up, involving crime and disorder partnerships and young offenders teams, and the work that is being done in our communities.
	A coherent approach is being taken across our communities and it is having a major effect on crime, but we all recognise that there is a continued problem with persistent young offenders, on whom the Government's current policy is focused.
	The Government have confronted many offenders who committed crimes in the 1980s and the early 1990s by providing them with routes out of crime through work and other measures—for example, opportunities through the new deal scheme. Those measures have provided people with the chance to work in our communities and not to commit crimes. However, we still have a problem with the young people who continue to commit crime, often because they are drug-related offenders.
	The Government instituted a process to consider our criminal justice system—the Halliday report and the Auld review—and to try to find a better way to deal with repeat offenders. That coherent, measured and considered approach has developed over a number of years. It is important to adopt that approach, and I sometimes hear echoes from the Conservative party that it is buying into it, but it should try to avoid the temptation to create headlines such as those sought in today's motion.
	It is simply not true to say that there has not been a long-term approach to the proposals in the Criminal Justice Bill. Two years ago, I held a sentencing conference in Wrexham to discuss the proposals set out in the Halliday review. Victims of crime, magistrates and the police attended, and we put our submissions to the Home Office. Those submissions and many others led to the proposals in the Bill, so there is a coherent view.
	I share many hon. Members' great distaste of catching and seeking headlines, which, in my view, always creates bad law. We politicians must try to resist the temptation, which is felt by Members on both sides of the House, to react by trying to introduce legislation to confront single events. We must follow the coherent, positive approach of consulting as widely as possible, trying to reach consensus on criminal justice matters if at all possible and introducing sensible measures that the courts can apply.
	We have debated the Sentencing Guidelines Council and the possibility of Parliament taking a more prescriptive role in setting sentencing guidelines. I have some sympathy with the suggestion that the courts should be more responsive to public concerns about certain offences. I suspect, however, that Parliament is not the right forum in which to devise a sentencing policy. I should want a much broader forum to be consulted, so that the issues raised by the victims of crime, the police and CPS could be taken into account more directly.
	The Sentencing Guidelines Council represents a sensible approach, but we need to ensure that we draw directly on the experiences of those in our communities who are concerned and feel helpless. I shall draw my comments to a conclusion by saying that I profoundly disagree with the suggestion that no coherent approach has been followed since 1997. The approach that has been taken has led to major improvements on our streets.

John Bercow: I should like briefly to focus my remarks on the need for honesty in sentencing and on the effect of overcrowding on the quality of rehabilitation programmes for persistent offenders.
	First, let us deal with honesty in sentencing and consider the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997. That Act provided for the imposition of mandatory minimum three-year prison sentences for adult domestic burglars thrice convicted. It is true—it is important to put this on the record—that the legislation contained a provision for the exercise of judicial discretion to facilitate a 20 per cent. reduction in a sentence when the person charged made a timely plea of guilty. However, the legislation specifically emphasised that the mandatory minimum sentence itself could be waived only in exceptional circumstances. So Parliament thought that it was legislating to create a new mandatory minimum sentence that would apply in the overwhelming majority of relevant cases.
	The legislation itself took effect in December 1999 to a fanfare of trumpets and was announced by the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw). In rightly referring to burglary as a sickening offence, he emphasised:
	XPeople need to know that criminals who make a living from house breaking will face a period of imprisonment which reflects their crimes."
	Moreover, I must emphasise that the Government's apparent intentions and seriousness of purpose on that subject were further underlined by the then Minister of State, Home Office, the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), who is now, of course, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills. He emphasised in an answer published at column 137W of Hansard on 23 April that the Government intended to persist with that policy and to undertake an evaluation of it throughout the criminal justice system, including its effect on the incidence of burglary in 2003–04, with a final evaluation of its efficacy to be undertaken in 2010. As right hon. and hon. Members will have already noted from my remarks about the time scale, however, it has been in effect for more than three years, so we are entitled to take an interim review. At the end of two years of the policy, only six such individuals, thrice convicted, had suffered the mandatory minimum imprisonment term of three years. I have not so far been able to obtain the statistics, which would be significant as they would tell us the other side of the equation: the number of individuals to whom that mandatory minimum sentence could have applied. Has the mandatory minimum sentence been applied to a tiny minority, or has the incidence been relatively small? We do not know that for certain. What we do know, however, is that, during 1999–2000, the police in England and Wales recorded 442,600 domestic burglaries, and no fewer than 16,800 people were sentenced for the commission of that offence. It therefore looks at least dangerously as though what Parliament willed and intended to be the application of a majority cases policy has somehow transmogrified and deteriorated into a policy applied in exceptional cases, rather than one that is waived in exceptional cases.
	That leads to the obvious question: do the Government believe that their policy in the implementation of the mandatory minimum sentence is right, and that the judiciary has been wrong to circumvent it? Alternatively, do the Government believe that they are wrong in their insistence on the mandatory minimum sentence of three years and that the judiciary have been right to circumvent it? I put it to the Minister who will wind up the debate, to whose response we look forward, that only one or other of those positions can be correct. It is not possible for both to be correct. We need to know the answer.
	On the subject of parliamentary oversight and scrutiny of sentencing guidelines, I largely endorse what a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends said. I am bound to say in support of the eloquent testimony of the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), that a Sentencing Guidelines Council that is chaired by the Lord Chief Justice and appointed by the Lord Chancellor is no substitute for the rigorous parliamentary scrutiny that I favour. That scrutiny could, and, I would suggest, should take place under the auspices of the Home Affairs Committee, which is admirably chaired by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin). What is not an option is the do-nothing approach. What we need—I say this to hon. Members on both sides of the House, and not in a partisan spirit—to counter the pervasive cynicism that characterises the conduct of our public life and the attitude of most people towards politics is demonstrable evidence for the public to observe that we say what we mean and we mean what we say. To do nothing would be an abdication by the Government of the responsibility to Parliament, and would simultaneously be an abdication of responsibility by Parliament to the public, who desperately seek the reassurance of a predictable, robust, credible and honest sentencing framework. That is the first issue of importance.
	The second issue is the impact of overcrowding. We know that, in June 2002, the prison population was 71,220. It is variously predicted to rise to 99,000 or 100,000 by 2009, and, dependent on the incidence of criminality and the length of sentences imposed by the courts, to as high as 109,000 or 110,000, even before we take account of the provisions of the Criminal Justice Bill. It is estimated that 14,000 current prisoners are effectively doubling up in shared cells that were originally designed for occupation by only one person.
	What more do we know about the effect of that overcrowding? We know that, in young offender institutions, for example, what operates is the phenomenon entitled Xthe churn": the process of constant transfer and movement of prisoners, including young offenders, from one institution to another, often taking place with little or no notice. That is exemplified by Glen Parva young offenders institution in Leicestershire, where, astonishingly and shamefully, only 4 per cent. of the 800 occupants are there for more than a month. We know the damage done to rehabilitation programmes and to the opportunity of training, education and job preparation in those circumstances.
	We know, too, because the evidence testifies to it, that purposeful activity has been declining since this Government took office. In only one of seven years, to the eternal discredit of Labour Members, has the target for purposeful activity, which is critical to the chances of reformation of character of criminals, been achieved. Six out of 15 key performance indicators have been flunked. The people affected are those persistent offenders in aid of whom the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) spoke sincerely and with integrity a few moments ago. Eighty-four per cent. of 14 to 17-year-old young offenders are reconvicted within two years of release from custody—we are talking about people in secure training centres, typically aged 14, who have been brought up in local authority care and have had no fewer, on average, than 22 convictions. Those people need more, better-funded and increasingly effective and tailored programmes of rehabilitation if they are to get off the conveyor belt of crime and have a chance of success in the future.
	My judgment is that the Government are guilty as charged of two serious offences in relation to sentencing policy and the effects of overcrowding on the critical objective of reforming prisoners. That reform must not be a Cinderella service, an optional extra or a belated afterthought in pursuit of the banner headline for the eye-catching initiative, the effect of which, whatever its intention, is invariably to betray the very people whom it intends to serve.

David Cameron: I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). He can speak for many hours without a note, to which it is always good to listen, but he has given me a couple of minutes to raise a particular constituency case to which I would like the Minister to listen.
	Many residents in my west Oxfordshire constituency have been terrorised by a particular criminal gang of violent burglars, who are believed to live in Cheltenham, next door in Gloucestershire. They have been responsible for dozens of burglaries. To illustrate, the Heyworth family, who live in the Cotswold wildlife park, said:
	XOften burglaries are repeated in the same houses, leading to great stress for the occupants. One house of a couple in their 70s was broken into, at night, twice in 48 hours."
	Another lady from Bampton told me:
	XAt least six friends and acquaintances have recently been targeted, the majority of whom like ourselves are elderly. The situation is intolerable."
	Clearly, this gang are causing great distress to all concerned.
	The police have had some success, but there are problems, which I would like to share with the Minister. One problem is that, while the clan or group believed to be responsible for these burglaries live in the Cheltenham area, they rarely commit offences on their own patch. John Liversidge, the area commander concerned in the Thames Valley police force, has written to me:
	XConsequently, the level of importance attached to the group by Gloucestershire is less than that given by surrounding forces, who bear the brunt of the gang's criminal activity."
	His second point is about the difficulty of calling on central resources when there are so many other calls.
	I have met the chief constable of the Thames Valley force and have visited, with Lord Hurd—my predecessor but one—the assistant chief constable of Gloucestershire. One issue arose, which I would like to raise in the remaining minute. I am concerned that some of the crime is falling between what the regional crime squads used to do and what is done now , on the one hand, by the National Crime Squad—which was set up to replace the regional crime squads—and, on the other, by the county forces. If we look at the National Crime Squad's mission document, we see that it is focused very much on class A drugs, organised immigration crime and high-tech crime. There is very little about cross-border burglary and I hope that the Minister will consider that point. The report refers to a
	Xperceived void in relation to activity . . . which deals with cross force/regional crime."
	The crime has been identified, but an answer to it has not been found.
	I wish to make three quick pleas to the Minister. First, will he not give forces too many targets that mean that they cannot deal with crime outside their own area? If he does, they will not deal with such crime. Secondly, will he ensure that the national crime squad deals with burglary because that is a serious problem? Thirdly, after this debate, will he also give the attack on burglary a much higher priority than it has had so far?
	A huge problem has not been mentioned sufficiently in the debate. The Lord Chief Justice's sentencing guidelines overturn what the sentencing advisory panel recommended and, God knows, that was weak enough in the first place. Ministers say that the Lord Chief Justice is talking only about not imprisoning a few first-time burglars, but they should read his judgment in the cases of Regina v. McInerney and Regina v. Keating. In two instances, which include aggravating circumstances and in which people could be put in fear and victims experience a dreadful burglary, Ministers will see that he is saying that the starting point should not be custody. Conservative Members firmly believe that it should be.

Dominic Grieve: We have heard a great deal in the debate about statistics. Several Labour members, including the hon. and learned Member for Dudley, North (Ross Cranston) and the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney), made the point that it was possible to be blinded by statistics. I entirely agree with them. Statistics should be approached with the knowledge that we all get from our constituencies, from what people tell us and from the experience of our lives. In that context, I point out to the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) that the suggestion that the Conservative party does not take an interest in neighbourhood and community issues in respect of crime is bunkum. I was the vice-chairman of a police community consultative group in Lambeth and those of us who have been involved in groups dealing with local crime prevention will find that a startling assertion.
	I always start not with the statistics for what has happened over the past five years but with the statistics for what has happened in this country over the past 50 years. Although those statistics may be misleading in their detail, the picture that they paint is horrific. I receive from septuagenarian constituents angry letters telling us that this country is an entirely different place in terms of crime from that they remember from their childhood, and they are absolutely right.
	I take as just one example the offence of wounding or other acts endangering life. In the year in which I was born, 1956, 1,227 such offences were committed. In 2000–01, the figure was 15,662 offences and, even under the old rules, there was a consistent upward trend in the late 1990s. Burglary has been spoken about at great length in the debate. In 1956, 85,000 burglaries were committed and we know that the figure peaked at 1.3 million. By 2000-01, the figure was more than 800,000 and surely the most significant thing about the latest statistics is that they strongly suggest that the bottoming out and gentle reduction have now been lost. If that is not the proper basis for an Opposition to initiate this debate, I cannot think what is. We should also consider the statistics for violent crime. The figure was as low as 3,000 in 1942, but it is now at an enormously high level.
	The Government say that things have not got so bad over the past five years. They are entitled to be judged by their performance and, over the past five years, it has been extremely poor. They came to office committed to building on the improvements of the previous four or five years of Conservative Government in matters of crime. They told us that they would be tough on crime and tough on its causes, and they have had five years in which to show their mettle. As has been pointed out in the debate, the statistics for burglary—but, above all, those for violent crime—show that, in the past 10 years and particularly since the Government came to office and notwithstanding a rising tide of national prosperity, the willingness of people to resort to casual violence, to violence for the sake of gain and to graduate from the punch-up to the use of the knife and to the use of the gun is one of the most worrying aspects of our society. I would have thought that the Government would agree with us on that. I also assume that the Government would agree with us about burglary in the mid-1990s. That is an example of what happens when a particular crime is targeted.
	What has been the Government's reaction? There has been plenty of discussion in the debate about two examples that show the Government's muddled thinking. The first example is the so-called mandatory sentence for gun crime, and the second is the message that they have put out about burglary. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) made a powerful speech about the way in which the mandatory three-year sentence for the repeat offender was implemented by the Government. They did not need to implement it if they did not want to, but its implementation has led nowhere.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) pointed out, the judicial guidelines have been tailored and transformed to meet the immediate crisis in prison numbers. There is no other explanation and the public are entitled to question the new guidelines when they do not appear to have any other basis and when the evidence is that the introduction of tougher guidelines in the mid-1990s was the very thing that brought about the one reduction in crime for which the previous Government and this Government could claim some credit. The Conservative Government could claim credit for initiating that policy and the present Government at least maintained it. I fear that that policy has now been almost totally abandoned and we will rapidly see the consequences of that. They are already manifest in the rising rate of burglary.
	My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) made the same point and made a plea for flexibility in the sentencing guidelines. He is absolutely right. Mandatory sentences in themselves very rarely work, so what happened at Prime Minister's questions 24 hours after the Home Office had accepted that the mandatory sentence for gun crime was nothing of the kind beggars belief. In answer to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk), the Prime Minister said:
	XThe five year mandatory sentence is not yet law, but we want it to be, and of course it would apply to such a person."—[Official Report, 8 January 2003; Vol. 397, c. 170.]
	He was referring to someone carrying a gun. In one of the most unpleasant passages that I have heard in the House, the Home Secretary suggested that my right hon. Friends the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) and the leader of the Conservative party were—he used an unparliamentary expression—being misleading, so what on earth are we to make of a Prime Minister who, 24 hours after the Home Office had corrected a wholly mistaken impression, decides to reinforce that impression in the House because he believes that that will make good copy? That was a disgrace. [Interruption.] The Home Secretary only has to read Hansard or to have it read to him to discover what was said. It was a wholly misleading statement, and quite deliberately so.
	The Home Secretary has also told us how things will improve in future. For example, he told us that the Halliday report on sentencing would be implemented in the Criminal Justice Bill and that we would have custody plus, custody minus and greater flexibility. In fact, that will not happen. He knows that, although the Bill will introduce many changes—including the possibility of custody plus and custody minus—the Government have already indicated that the changes cannot, at present, be implemented, presumably because the resources are not available. I have to say to the Home Secretary that that was another extremely misleading comment.
	The remedies that the Government have come up with are a series of ersatz ideas. We have talked about the 100 initiatives and mandatory sentences, but all the Government do is make headlines saying that they will attack and undermine the principles of jury trial—we will consider that tomorrow in the Committee considering the Criminal Justice Bill—when the number of people affected by that in terms of reducing crime is totally irrelevant. Yet the Government's proposal is an illiberal measure characteristic of their approach.
	Then the Home Secretary told us about Mr. Braddon's visit. That fascinated me. He came over to tell us how New York has achieved its lowest violent crime rate—indeed, its lowest crime rate overall—since 1900. That is a complete contrast to this country and the Home Secretary seems to have accepted that we should study that example. This Home Secretary's tenure, however, has been characterised by a period of maximum police demoralisation because they are unable to carry out the task that they want to do. It is small wonder, therefore, that the crisis is so marked in my area of Thames Valley and no surprise that the Dyfed-Powys police force has the highest clear-up rate for crime. Dyfed-Powys police has the highest number of police officers per head of population; Thames Valley has one of the worst clear-up rates and one of the lowest number of police officers per head of population.
	The Home Secretary has been unable and unwilling to tackle that issue. It is ultimately a matter of priorities. So let us consider the Government's priorities. At the moment, they are happy to spend #2.5 billion per annum giving us bureaucratic structures for regional government. If they had different priorities, that could be used instead to provide 25,000 police officers. The choice is theirs. They know from our Committee work that they will have reasoned support from us for sensible measures, but they have chosen to hide behind a series of spins and deceits to conceal the fact from the general public that they know, just as much as the public do, that there is a serious problem with violent crime. The Home Secretary is like a raging bull in a china shop: he can smash the crockery and smash civil liberties in the process, but he produces limited results for his exertions. He would do well to step back, consider the matter carefully and embark on sensible and long-term policies rather than a series of gimmicks.

Hilary Benn: I think we were subjected to the nice cop, nasty cop routine at the beginning and the end of the debate. I definitely prefer the nice cop even if there were elements of Gilbert and Sullivan to the speech by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin). I am grateful to him for being honest enough to admit that he had changed his mind on sentencing. I agreed with him wholeheartedly on one thing. He said that we were debating a long-running problem. He is right about that. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) made the same point. In anticipation of tomorrow's debate, let me make it clear that the hon. Gentleman's criticism of changes to jury trial does not bear examination if one considers the measured comments of the Home Affairs Committee, which did not manage to get as excited about our proposed changes as he did.
	The debate focused on several issues. Statistics received a great deal of attention. I agree with the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) that we must have faith in them, but my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Ross Cranston) gave the most balanced account of the Government's record on crime.
	On gun crime and firearms, I listened with great interest to the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), who dissected the circumstances that might arise when dealing with possession of a firearm. I think he acknowledged, however, that the existing law is not being properly applied. That begs the question of how it can be better applied. There is no doubt of the need for the changes proposed by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary so that the exceptional circumstances are clear. Of course the judiciary have to judge what the sentence should be for carrying a firearm in public. What possible purpose could someone have for doing that? There is also a strong case to ban the carrying of replica weapons in a public place.
	The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) spoke with passion about the position in which householders find themselves when faced with burglars. He knows that the law allows someone to use reasonable force. For the reasons that the hon. and learned Member for Harborough gave, that has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. I do not understand how a subjective test, which is what the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk argued for in relation to the use of force against burglars, could replace it. From a different perspective, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) spoke with equal passion about the need to take the crimes of rape and domestic violence seriously. She welcomed the Government's steps to do precisely that.
	We also heard a range of views on sentencing. I am sure that we will have a lively debate when we discuss the clauses in the Criminal Justice Bill in Committee and on Report which deal with the Sentencing Guidelines Council. I hope that the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) will support the proposed changes. The position on third-time convicted burglars is not as he set out. To get to a third conviction under the Crime (Sentencing) Act 1997, a burglar would need to have two previous convictions and sentences since the Act came into force in December 1999, so the clock needs to tick a little longer. However, I am happy to write to him with more information on that. He is right about the impact of the Xchurn" on the prison population.
	The hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) raised the problem of burglary. He may be interested to know that Peter Hampson, the chief constable for West Mercia, is leading ACPO's work on that.
	Notwithstanding the ritual denunciation of the Government by the Opposition, the truth came out in patches. We are trying to deal with a problem—the causes of crime and its terrible consequences—that will not be solved by soundbites issued by any party or by a fruitless argument about who is harder than whom when it comes to punishing criminals. Of course people must be called to account for what they have done, but surely years of experience under Conservative and Labour Governments have taught us that the real question is what will work best, as the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey said. We need to consider what we need to do to prevent people from offending and reoffending.
	Those of us who represent inner-city constituencies understand perhaps better than anyone the effect that crime and the fear of crime have on the people we represent. I am sure that we have all had constituents in our surgeries who have been in tears and in despair, and wondering why they are forced to live in a certain way. No doubt every MP has shared my feeling of anger and helplessness at that time. Even though crime overall has fallen under the Government, that does not matter to that person at that moment because he or she has experienced a crime. The challenge is to put the emotion felt by our constituents, by us as Members and by society as a whole to effective use. That is what the Government and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary are trying to do.
	We have heard contradictory criticisms of the Home Secretary. On the one hand, he is accused of trying to do too much; on the other hand, he is not doing enough. One of his defining characteristics is that he will try to make a difference.
	The hon. Member for Beaconsfield asked what are our priorities. Very simply, they include a determination to increase the number of police officers, which is why we now have a record number, after the disastrous decline that occurred under the last Conservative Government. We are determined to give community support officers better equipment, so that they can support police authorities by talking to communities about what kind of policing they want. We need to audit what the police do, and we need to try to cut bureaucracy.
	It is determination that lies behind changes to the criminal justice system. The proposal for street bail in the Criminal Justice Bill has been welcomed by hon. Members on both sides of the House. That is a practical measure to cut bureaucracy and to help police officers to do their job. We are determined to provide new sentences for the courts—indeterminate sentences, which will mean at last that people are not released when everybody knows that they are still a risk to the public. We are determined to invest more money in offending behaviour programmes, drug treatment and sex offender treatment. We are determined to support people who are imprisoned by their drug habit, which is the subject of the next debate.
	In the best example of the Government's priorities, we are determined to tackle offenders when they are young. Members on both sides of the House have paid tribute to youth justice reforms because, despite the cynics, they recognised that something could be done. We have halved the time that it takes to get people from crime to sentence, and we have reduced reoffending.
	Finally, I concur with the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) because we cannot solve this problem if we leave it only to the police, the courts, the probation service and the prisons. This is a problem for the community and for society. We have to make clear our values: we want to treat people with dignity and respect; we call on people to account for what they have done; we want to protect ourselves from those against whom we need protection; we want to give help to those who have offended, if they are prepared to change the way they live. If we do not have those values in our society, we will never solve this problem and find effective ways of tackling crime and building a safer society.

Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	The House divided: Ayes 152, Noes 365.

Question accordingly negatived.
	Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Mr. Deputy Speaker forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	Resolved,
	That this House welcomes the steps the Government has taken and continues to take to reform all aspects of law enforcement including increasing police numbers to record levels and the 6.1 per cent. increase in police funding for 2003–04; further welcomes the steps the Government is taking to modernise the criminal justice system through the coherent long-term strategies and the introduction of the Criminal Justice Bill; notes that for the last five years crime rates have fallen by 27 per cent. according to the British Crime Survey, that burglary has reduced by 39 per cent. since 1997 and that the chances of becoming a victim of crime are as low as at any time in the last 20 years; and particularly supports the decisive action being taken by the Government to tackle street crime and the rise in gun-related crime.

Drugs Policy

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I must announce to the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Oliver Letwin: I beg to move,
	That this House recognises the fundamental importance of the link between hard drugs and crime; and believes that the only means by which an effective onslaught on the hard drugs culture can be made is through mandatory intensive treatment and rehabilitation for young heroin and cocaine addicts.
	We have already had a rather vigorous debate, part of which the Under-Secretary was lucky enough to miss, and inevitably a rather political one, about the Government's record on crime in general. I should like to take the opportunity of this second and slightly shorter debate to do something quite different. I want to try to make a plea to the Under-Secretary which I do not expect him to accept on the spot, but which I hope may influence his thinking and perhaps lead us to some sort of agreement over the coming months on what I regard as a critical and tragic error that the Government are currently making.
	I do not doubt for a second the genuine intention of the Government and indeed the Under-Secretary, who has spoken about the matter frequently and passionately, to reduce significantly the menace of hard drugs in Britain. That is common ground in all parts of the House. Nor do I doubt for a moment that the hon. Gentleman and the Government are willing to devote resources to the effort to reduce the menace of hard drugs, both in pursuit of the supply side and the drug dealers themselves—both remotely and in the United Kingdom—and through demand-side measures, if I can put it that way, or the effort to rehabilitate those who are caught in the vortex of heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine. I do not doubt that, alongside the resources that the Government have already devoted and the increased resources that they are now devoting to that pursuit, they intend to construct what they conceive to be the best possible way forward.
	I doubt none of that, but I genuinely believe that the method that the Government are currently employing will mean that a large proportion of the very many hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of taxpayers' money that they are spending on this matter will be tragically wasted. I believe that the sort of proposals that the Opposition have been making offer not necessarily the only alternative, but a serious and plausible alternative that could provide some serious and lasting benefit to society.
	It is the Minister's regular taunt that, roughly speaking, I became interested in drugs at the last Conservative party conference. That is not so.
	At the beginning of last year, I began investigating what was happening to young people who were on drugs. I freely admit that until I occupied my current position, I knew little about the subject. When I began investigating and talking to young people who were caught in the nexus, to those who had been caught in it, to those who were on the way out of it, and to those not only in this country but in the Netherlands and Sweden who had been trying to help young people out of it, I realised that there is an appalling gap between reality and rhetoric confronting this country.
	The Minister tells us that 118,000 people have contact with drug treatment. He also said—honestly and correctly, I am sure—that he intends roughly to double that number through hundreds of millions of pounds of further expenditure. In practice, that means that many young people visit a form of agency or doctor's surgery and receive something that keeps them going. It may be heroin, methadone or counselling. It may help them for a while to remove themselves from the crime statistics. However, in many cases, it does little or nothing to remove them permanently and properly from the vortex into which they have descended.

Robert Key: Does my right hon. Friend remember visiting my constituency and the drug abuse resistance education—DARE—project, which is run so successfully in our local primary schools by the Ministry of Defence police? Does he realise that, despite the Government's good intentions, the alcohol and drug advisory service in south Wiltshire is so understaffed that it takes six months before people can see a counsellor?

Oliver Letwin: I remember the visit. I have the highest regard for DARE and its work and I am aware of the overstretch in referrals. However, even if the alcohol and drug abstinence service in my hon. Friend's constituency receives additional funding in the next round, referrals will be almost useless in many cases. They will maintain and perhaps reduce the ability, desire and, in some cases, need of some young people to engage in criminal activity, but they will not reconstruct lives.
	All my experience shows that reconstructing a life that has been severely damaged and almost destroyed by heroin, cocaine or crack cocaine addiction, almost always accompanied by a cocktail of other drug and alcohol-related problems and a range of psychological and social problems, cannot be done on the cheap. Such a life cannot be reconstructed in an amateur fashion or by maintenance. That can be achieved only through repeated, intensive psychological effort in residential or crypto-residential care. If the House were so organised, a stream of witnesses could appear to testify to that from their experience.
	I do not claim that every young life that needs rescuing can be saved only if the young people live on top of the shop. However, there is a chance of genuine success only if the relevant people are, from morning till night and through the night, in conditions that allow them to focus entirely on rebuilding their lives. Even then, all my experience shows that the success rate is far from 100 per cent. Relapse will occur, and people will have to go through the system twice and sometimes thrice to escape.
	The power of the drugs that we are considering for an addictive personality is so great that rescue is an arduous undertaking. I do not believe that the Under-Secretary and I would disagree; I suspect that he has seen and heard many of the same things as me. I am sure that he has talked to the same sort of people as me. Much of what I am saying probably rings bells in his mind, too. I appreciate that the Government do not have a bottomless coffer and I therefore recommend focusing and using the limited available resources, including the additional money, on the youngest who are caught in the vortex, and not trying to deal with every case.
	It is evident that if we can deal with the flow, we will tackle the stock over time. When I visited the Netherlands, I was told that the average age of cocaine and heroin addicts is currently increasing by 360 days a year. Almost no one is joining the queue. That is the most striking statistic that I know, and I have mentioned it before. The Netherlands has reached the tipping point and succeeded in persuading young people that the drugs are loser drugs and worth avoiding. That has also happened in Sweden. Enough people have been cured to begin to make the cure social. At that point, funds can be released for referrals for older people who are on drugs and to place them in intensive treatment.
	We will reach the tipping point in this country by focusing and spending the money on the young and subjecting them to intensive, residential rehabilitation. We must find a means of forcing those young people into treatment. Without that, nothing else will work. Offering treatment is not enough because although the offer may be taken up, in most cases it will happen four or five years later.

Dari Taylor: Does the right hon. Gentleman support supervised prescriptions of heroin? That was one of the most strategic planks of the policy in the Netherlands to persuade young people not only to accept treatment but to get out of the dealer's grip.

Oliver Letwin: The techniques that have been used in the Netherlands vary. However, the genuinely impressive part of the Netherlands experience is not the maintenance programmes for those who are old, but the intensive rehabilitation through abstinence of young people who have subsequently managed to escape the vortex. I do not discount the possibility of what the Under-Secretary effectively sanctions in the United Kingdom—maintenance of older drug users. It is better for people to receive methadone—bad as it is—than to rob old people to pay for that or heroin. However, that is not a cure; it simply dockets the problem. I urge moving young people out of the drugs culture through intensive, rehabilitative abstinence programmes. It is impressive that the Netherlands and Sweden have managed to achieve that.

Dari Taylor: Like the right hon. Gentleman, I have considered the way in which the matter is tackled throughout the world as well as in Britain. All the evidence shows that if young or older people do not wish to come off the stuff, it does not matter how much we try to force them. Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept the research?

Oliver Letwin: No. That is not my experience from talking to people who are in the programmes or those who are conducting them. I have been told repeatedly that the hon. Lady's contention is false. I am prepared to subject the matter to empirical investigation. I do not propose leaping at the problem. I propose conducting pilot studies of mandatory treatment for the young and ascertaining whether that works. The hon. Lady and I would not then have to hold a discussion in the abstract, because we would know. We should conduct the world's first serious experiment to ascertain whether we can crack the problem empirically.

Henry Bellingham: What my right hon. Friend is saying is compelling, but does he agree that we also need dedicated, determined, committed GPs who understand drug addicts and want to work in drug rehabilitation clinics? Will he look at the case of my constituent Dr. Adrian Garfoot, who, having been struck off by the General Medical Council, is doing absolutely nothing and who wants to be out there helping to save drug addicts' lives?

Oliver Letwin: I will indeed look at that case. I have been vastly impressed by the work of people in or near my constituency. GPs involved in the Providence project have reached the same conclusion as my hon. Friend's constituent and are devoting their lives to exactly the same goal—and it is working.

Diane Abbott: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the prevalence of drugs in our prisons? It is possible to go into a prison such as Holloway drug free and come out with a drug habit. I think that, before embarking on extensive treatment programmes, Ministers could do more to make our prisons drug-free zones.

Oliver Letwin: Over the last week or two I have observed an alarming tendency on my part—which I had never suspected probable—to agree repeatedly with the hon. Lady. That may be as disturbing to her as it is to me. In my view she is undeniably right.
	I find it extraordinary that there are still drugs in prisons. I do not find it extraordinary that there are drugs anywhere else; but if a prison is about keeping people in, one would have thought that it might be able to keep substances out. I do not speak for open prisons, but one would have thought that making closed prisons drug-free zones was a feasible operation. Not only are they not drug-free zones but, as the hon. Lady says, in some cases—tragically—people go in unaffected by drugs and come out affected by them.
	I hope the Government will produce measures to make the Prison Service more effective in excluding drugs. I think we shall have to accept more restrictions on visiting by relatives. That will be a sorry loss—there is no doubt that physical barriers distance prisoner from visitor, and there is no doubt that that may have an effect on rehabilitation—but so bad is the drugs menace in our prisons that we may have to contemplate it.

Paul Flynn: I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on what strikes me as the most courageous and pragmatic Front-Bench speech made during my 15 years in the House. During his observations on Holland, he accurately stated that heroin and cocaine were seen as the drugs of losers. Is that not the result of 25 years in which Holland has separated the markets for hard and soft drugs? Soft drugs are seen to be undesirable, but are not associated with an underworld or with low life. As a result, those taking or selling hard drugs are isolated, which has led to a reduction in the use of all drugs and a marginalisation of suppliers and users of hard drugs.

Oliver Letwin: As I think I have said here before, two models appear to have been successful. One is, indeed, in the Netherlands, where the very strategy described by the hon. Gentleman has been adopted—separation of the markets. The other is in Sweden, where serious efforts have been made to eliminate both markets. The one strategy that shows little or no promise of success is, I regret to say, the Government's approach to soft drugs—a muddled approach that neither separates the markets nor seeks to eliminate them. I will continue to inveigh against that approach.

Michael Weir: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Oliver Letwin: I will give way one last time.

Michael Weir: The right hon. Gentleman seems to see intensive treatment in prisons or young offenders institutions as in-patient treatment of a sort. Specialist drugs corps are about to be piloted in Scotland. They will deal not just with drug-dependent but with criminal behaviour, and try to get young people off drugs in that way. I agree with the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott): unless people are willing to stop taking drugs in the first place, no system will work.

Oliver Letwin: I repeat my view—and, as I have said, I am prepared for the Government to subject it to empirical investigation. I do not think it essential for people to want to stop at the beginning of treatment; what is essential is for the reconstruction of a life to be such that by the end of the treatment the person wants to stay off drugs. I do not envisage programmes in young offenders institutions or prisons; on the contrary, it is clear to me that they should take place in clinics. They are separate from the issue of punishment, and need to be kept separate from it. But a life can only be reconstructed in the right way if the person concerned is purposeful, and that must involve constructive rather than criminal purpose. For many of the young people who commit today's burglaries and robberies crime is virtually a necessity, because it is impossible to feed a drugs habit without being either very rich or prone to crime.

Bob Spink: I think my right hon. Friend is on the right track in considering compulsion in rehabilitation, but will he also consider prevention? As he knows, the first use of any drug by a young person often occurs under the influence of alcohol. Is it not regrettable that, in the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, Labour removed police officers' right to take unopened cans and bottles of alcohol from young people in public places? Will my right hon. Friend encourage the Government to reinstate that power, so that the police can save youngsters from getting involved in drugs in the first place?

Oliver Letwin: My hon. Friend is right to mention the severe problems of binge drinking among the young. We need to think again about how we can prevent the habit from becoming widespread. There is no doubt that it is associated with being dragged into the drugs culture as a whole.
	I am outstaying my welcome—[Hon. Members: XMore!"] No. This is a short debate, and I want both my hon. Friends and Labour Members to have a chance to speak.
	I hope I have made clear the contrast between this debate and the earlier piece of splendid political knockabout on both sides of the House. In this second debate, I have argued passionately for a position I believe to be right, which need not separate the political parties. It can be adopted by the Government now. It could prevent a tragic waste of resources, and—at least as important—could save thousands of young people from being drawn into the vortex that so afflicts not just them and their families, but the many victims of the crimes that they find themselves compelled to commit.

Bob Ainsworth: I beg to move, To leave out from XHouse" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	Xrecognises that focusing on Class A drugs, educating young people about the dangers of all drugs, preventing drug misuse, combating the dealers, reducing availability and treating addicts are all essential in tackling drugs; and welcomes the Government's updated Drug Strategy and the 44 per cent. increase in planned expenditure on combating drugs, from #1.026 billion in the current financial year to nearly #1.5 billion in the year starting April 2005."
	I thank the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) for the serious way in which he presented his case, and I will try to respond seriously. I must say that so far I have not taken his alternatives to the updated drugs strategy very seriously, for what I believe to be good and practical reasons. I see a number of holes in what he suggests, and a number of real inconsistencies in what we hear from the Conservatives about drugs strategy.
	I want to ask the right hon. Gentleman some questions—let him by all means intervene if he wishes—about his proposals. He seems to be suggesting that an awful lot more should be spent on the rehabilitation of relatively few people. It would be good to know exactly what he proposes. Does he propose a substantial increase in spending, or does he propose to take money away from some parts of the strategy in order to pay for others? I understood him to say the latter—that he intended, in large part, to abandon rehabilitation treatments for many people in order to concentrate on the young.

Oliver Letwin: I am grateful to the Minister for the spirit in which he is approaching this, and I will answer his question. I do not have the precise figures in my mind, but I believe that his intention to increase by about 118,000 the number of people in contact with treatment is scheduled by the Government to cost about #325 million, or perhaps somewhat more—perhaps even #400 million. The proposal that I make to the Government today—because I understand the requirements that the Home Office faces in dealing with the Chancellor—is that that money, which would otherwise be increasing the numbers of those in contact, in some vague sense, with some set of agencies, should instead be spent on the kind of programme that I am describing. We have costed such a policy at #460 million a year. Almost the entirety of that sum could be found from the additional sum that the Minister has in mind. For our own part, I have agreed with my colleague, the shadow Secretary of State for Health, that if we were in government we would find the money from the health budget, because the savings to the national health service alone would, over time, justify that. I am not, however, asking the Minister to agree to that. He already has a budget of the same order of magnitude as ours—perhaps not to the last #10 million, but of the same order none the less—and if he could spend it on the policy that we are proposing, it would be vastly better spent.

Bob Ainsworth: Presumably the right hon. Gentleman would spend that money by withdrawing interventions that are available for other people who would then not be covered. So, under his proposals, there would be no new money such as that outlined in our updated drugs strategy. Let us take an example of what that money needs to be spent on. One of the biggest gaps that we have identified is the need for through-care and after-care for people leaving prison. We have found that, unless there is adequate provision for picking those people up as they are released and carrying them through into community treatment services, they will go straight back to the market, and to the dealers. They will begin committing crimes again, and that is one of the main causes of the revolving door syndrome in which people go back into criminality almost as soon as they are released from prison. I suppose that that money provided in the updated drugs strategy would no longer be there under the right hon. Gentleman's proposals, because he would just have spent it on rehabilitation. That is one example of an important gap that we are seeking to plug and to provide for effectively being taken away by the Conservatives.

Oliver Letwin: I am grateful to the Minister for giving me the opportunity to engage in what I think is constructive repartee. Let us test his proposition. Why do we not try piloting the proposal that I am suggesting, and the one that he is suggesting, in relation to picking people up as they come out of prison? Both are worthy objectives, but I suspect that the empirical evidence would show that his methods would fail to have much impact on ex-prisoners and that my methods would succeed in getting those people off drugs. If I am wrong, however, the empirical evidence would show that, and we need not nationalise it.

Bob Ainsworth: It would be worth the right hon. Gentleman's while considering his own policy and putting it up against some of the proposals in the updated drugs strategy. I do not know what opportunity he has had—with all his different responsibilities—with the research facilities that he has available to him, to go into the detail of where we are planning to spend the additional money. One of the other areas is that of making early interventions through the criminal justice system to oblige people into treatment. That is something that the right hon. Gentleman is advocating, yet he seems to think that he can lift the pot of money allocated for piloting presumptions against bail, for extending the drug testing programme, and for doubling the amount of drug testing and treatment orders. I know that there has been criticism from the Conservatives about the failure rate, or success rate, of DTTOs, but when we look at the kind of people we are dealing with in relation to the orders, we can see that, in the circumstances, we are doing very well in terms of the interventions that we are trying to make. All that additional money would be taken away by the right hon. Gentleman to provide residential rehabilitation across the piece for a particular group of people.
	The right hon. Gentleman asks for empirical evidence, saying that he believes that the Government are honest in their intentions, but misguided. Well, from whom should we get our information? I would have thought that we should get it from people with a long record of working in the field, who have experience of providing drug treatment and services in our communities. In preparation for this debate, I spoke to Geoff Cobb, the chief executive of the Swanswell trust, which provides drug and alcohol services in Birmingham, Coventry and Warwickshire. He has had 30 years' experience of working in that area. He said of the right hon. Gentleman's proposal:
	XResidential rehabilitation is very expensive, and very often inappropriate. Increasingly, those who need it are getting help because of the growth in the quantity and quality of community services."
	He makes a plea:
	XLet the NTA"—
	the national treatment agency—
	Xget on with the work that they are doing, because we are beginning to get to the point that we need to get to."
	The right hon. Member for West Dorset must have received DrugScope's response to his consultation on the proposals that he is now putting before the House. He is asking the House to consider the evidence. I do not know what he thinks of DrugScope. It does not agree with Government policy in every area, but it appears to be one of the more serious organisations and it is taken seriously by almost everyone working in drug rehabilitation, treatment and services in this country. DrugScope's response to the Conservatives' consultation states that their costings are incorrect, their policy is too rigid, there is no evidence base to support what they suggest, and the basis on which they make their analysis is flawed. Its recommendations to the Conservative party go on to say:
	XWe would urge the Conservative party to reconsider their proposed drugs policy."
	DrugScope suggests that the evidence on which the policy is based is Xpartial and inaccurate", and says that it is worried that the policy would be Xunworkable" and that it would
	Xharm the young people it seeks to help".
	There is the first evidence in response to the right hon. Gentleman's proposals.

Gary Streeter: I know that the Minister takes this issue very seriously and, like the rest of us, is keen to do what he can about the issue of drugs. Is he sure, however, that his existing policy is working? The police in Plymouth told me last Friday that, of 38 DTTOs issued to people in Plymouth over the last few months, 28 of those people were arrested while still subject to one of those orders for offences related to their drug habit. They were committing crimes while still subject to a DTTO. That is the picture that is emerging from the police's empirical studies of the Minister's current system. If it is not working, why does he not open his mind to alternatives?

Bob Ainsworth: If the hon. Gentleman wants to examine whether there is a local anomaly in Plymouth, compared with the national situation, I would be happy to study that with him. Yes, there are failures relating to DTTOs, but the orders are aimed at people who would otherwise go to prison because they have a drug problem that has led them into serious crime. Yes, there are people who fail, and who are brought back in, but taken overall, when we consider the nature of those with whom we are dealing and the size of the problem, DTTOs are working in a high proportion of cases.
	One of the areas of funding that the Conservatives are suggesting that we remove relates to the ability to introduce DTTO-type policies for a lower level of criminality at an earlier point of intervention, as an addition to community sentencing. We would then be able to put a requirement for drug testing and treatment on the very people whom the right hon. Member for West Dorset says he is trying to cut off before they become serious drug offenders and provide us with the levels of crime that we are experiencing. That is the funding that is in the updated drugs strategy, which the right hon. Gentleman proposes to remove to pay for expensive rehabilitation that everybody working in the field says is inappropriate in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Simon Hughes: The Minister has preyed in aid the views of DrugScope, which is well respected and which I have visited as it is based in my part of south London. Is he willing to take its advice on other areas of drugs policy on which it suggests that the Government ought to choose a different route? In particular, does he accept that DrugScope is clear that if public policy concentrated on the class A and serious drug users and did not pursue people who possess cannabis for their own use and the like, there would be a much clearer message, much more concentrated resources and, on the basis of all its evidence, a much more successful policy on separating the casual user, referred to by the hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn), from the addict, who regularly uses criminals to supply his addiction?

Bob Ainsworth: I always take seriously what DrugScope says and I am always prepared to listen to it, but the Government do not agree with it on every single area.

George Osborne: So DrugScope is right only when it attacks Conservative policies, not Labour ones.

Bob Ainsworth: The comments on the Conservative party paper are a little more scathing than anything that has been said about the updated drugs strategy. DrugScope has not said things in such strong terms in response to our updated drugs strategy. [Interruption.] We began the debate with a serious attempt to study the issue, but if we are going to descend into heckling, we can do something else by all means.
	Let me say to the right hon. Member for West Dorset that that is not the biggest dispute between the Government and DrugScope. The Government have moved on the issue and we want the police to concentrate their efforts on the dealers and traffickers. We do not want the police to let up on cannabis traffickers, because they are often the same people who deal with class A drugs, but nor do we want them disproportionately concerning themselves with simple possession cases, which is why we reclassified cannabis. I know that the Liberal Democrats would go a lot further, but we have decided not to. However, we certainly listened to the sense of what was being said.
	I have tried to take the right hon. Gentleman's comment seriously and I abandoned the speech that I had prepared so as to run across all our proposals on the updated drugs strategy, but the problem is a lot more complex than he seems to think, with his single initiative, which appears to be rehabilitation, rehabilitation, rehabilitation. We must try to hit the drug problem across the piece. We must tackle supply as best we can. We must co-operate with Governments abroad, such as those of Afghanistan, Jamaica, Turkey and our European partners, to try to cut off the supply.
	We must improve our policing. We must improve the input against what we call the middle market—the linkage between the traffickers nationally and the problem on the streets. We plan to apply money to that. We must have intensive policing in those areas that suffer from problems of crack cocaine with all that flows from them, such as the connections with violence and gun crime. We must protect our communities by having a comprehensive programme of inputs, using the criminal justice system wherever appropriate, to oblige people into treatment. We do not disagree with the right hon. Gentleman on that in principle. At every stage, we want to use the criminal justice system to get people into treatment.
	We are going to run a pilot involving presumption against bail. We are going to have new community sentence DTTO alternatives. We are going to double the number of DTTOs. We already have mandatory testing in nine police force areas and we are going to roll that out to all high-crime areas. There are a lot of issues on which we do not disagree with the right hon. Gentleman in principle.

John Bercow: Given that the Minister is arguing for a multifaceted approach and that he has criticised what I thought was the shrewd and noble focus of my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset on a specific and valuable proposal, can he tell me and the House his specific proposal today to tackle the horrifying exacerbation of the drugs problem that comes about through the virtually unrestricted circulation of drugs in prison, to which reference was made earlier?

Bob Ainsworth: If the hon. Gentleman believes that there is some easy answer on the total eradication of drugs in prisons, please let us have it, as we have put in a lot of effort on that over some time. We have mandatory testing in prisons and the positive results have fallen considerably, which probably indicates a degree of success. The comprehensive counselling, assessment, referral, advice and through-care services programme is considering how to advise people and providing them with treatment wherever possible, carrying them right through. We are looking to beef up the back end of the CARATS programme to provide effective through-care and aftercare for prisoners, but of course the Prison Service needs to do everything it can to try to keep drugs out of prisons. All of us in the House would urge it to continue to do that.

George Osborne: My constituency contains Styal women's prison, which is the second largest women's prison in England. The chief inspector of prisons, who recently inspected it, estimated that some 40 per cent. of the prisoners were on heroin, although the Government think that the figure is much higher. Styal still does not have a proper drug detoxification unit, partly because it has changed from a small to a large prison in the past couple of years. Will the Minister consider the particular case of Styal prison and its desperate need, as identified by the chief inspector, for a drug detoxification unit?

Bob Ainsworth: Yes, I will. We are happy to consider that case, but I ask the hon. Gentleman—this is as true in the community as it is here—to consider who should take the decisions as to where and whether a detox programme is needed in a particular area or in a particular establishment. I suggest that there are many other issues on which he would come to the House and argue that, in imposing a rigid system, rehab would be provided across the board, even where it was not necessarily the most appropriate input, which is exactly what I am arguing now. That is not a decision for Ministers. It would be far better taken in the locality following consideration of its needs. Detox is about 10 times more expensive than some other interventions, so we are talking about big money here. If we provided residential rehabilitation where it was not needed, we would be wasting money that badly needs to be spent in other areas.

Diane Abbott: On the question of drugs in prisons, my hon. Friend will be aware that I was a graduate trainee with the Home Office many years ago, and I worked in the prisons department. There are no easy answers, but some straightforward things could be done, including regularly searching warders for drugs, which does not happen at present. Restrictions on visitors were referred to earlier. Also, we must make absolutely sure that there are no vestiges of the attitude that I saw in the prisons department 20 years ago among those at prison governor grade—at least if the prisoners are spaced out of their heads, they are easier to manage. I do not have a magic solution, but those simple things would go some way towards clearing drugs out of prisons.

Bob Ainsworth: One hopes that those attitudes have been eradicated from the Prison Service and that we are seriously considering how to help people as much as we can, but, as the right hon. Member for West Dorset says, the drugs strategy also needs to address the problem of young people, as the right hon. Member for West Dorset says. If we do not cut off tomorrow's problematic drug users, we shall wind up having treated one set of people as others are coming along behind them to provide the same problem. We estimate that there are about 250,000 problematic drug users in this country. If he is suggesting, as he appears to be, that many of them can effectively be abandoned so that we can spend the money that is available on a relative few, that will not help us to cut the crime that is caused by the drug problem in our country.

John Mann: My hon. Friend says that decisions on what forms of treatment should be available need to be made at local level. Who should make those decisions, and what criteria and evidence base should they use to judge success?

Bob Ainsworth: In the first instance, it has to be the drugs action team. We must ensure that the DAT is properly structured and can make a good analysis of all the area's needs, and that all the relevant local agencies have a proper input. It is our responsibility to ensure that there are adequate resources for DATs to commission services, and then we must hold them to account. I do not see how we can impose a rigid system from the centre on every area, insisting that there should be so many rehab places. People nearer to the problem in a particular area will understand its size, structure and complexity and will seek to commission services to deal with it. That is common sense, and it would use the money available in the most cost-effective way.

John Mann: The majority of people on my DAT, like every other, are not from the health professions. What other part of the national health service makes health decisions through people such as council officers, police and probation officers, rather than health professionals?

Bob Ainsworth: DATs cannot consist solely of health professionals. Other people, including some from the local authority, need to have an input.
	I have spoken for longer than I should. I commend the updated drugs strategy to the House. I ask the House to reject the motion and support the amendment. There are no simple solutions to this problem, but the updated drugs strategy builds on the work that has been done and the lessons that have been learned over the past four years. Only by pursuing it with vigour and ensuring that we deliver do we stand a chance of reducing the significant drug problem that we have in our country, which causes so much crime and misery. The Government are absolutely pledged to that. It is a major priority for us. I commend the amendment to the House.

David Heath: Something rather interesting is happening. We are edging towards the point at which we have a sensible, rational debate on the problems of drugs in this country—the second debate on the subject in this Chamber in about five weeks, and that is a precedent. The issue is no longer a peripheral one and it is being approached sensibly, without sloganising or fixed attitudes. The Home Affairs Committee report was a great help in that process, as was the approach taken by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin). I do not agree with everything in the motion, and I will explain why, but I commend him for the manner in which he set out his ideas.
	We are witnessing a retreat from certainty, and that is a very good thing, because none of us can be certain about what is the right approach. There is conflicting evidence, and various initiatives have been tried but have failed. We all edge our way forwards. What is the firm ground? We can all accept—it is explicit in the motion—that the drugs trade is a motor of crime. I was certainly convinced of that when I was chairman of a police authority in Avon and Somerset. I saw that the drugs trade was a significant problem not only in inner-city Bristol but throughout the force area, driving burglary, street crime and car crime in rural as well as urban areas, as people often found that the pickings were richer out in the country, where property was perhaps less well defended. On the back of that, circumstances were created in which organised crime and gun crime could prosper, and many evils resulted.
	We can also all agree that we want to be effective in dealing with the supply and distribution of hard drugs. Importation is clearly a factor. I am still critical of the extent to which the Government's efforts have been focused on closing down some of the import routes, especially in central Asia. I have been concerned for some time that the diplomatic effort in that area has been insufficient. Police officers in Bristol have also complained strongly about the West Indies, suggesting that every plane arriving from Jamaica for some time has been a source of hard drugs in the Bristol area. I am not convinced that the interdiction efforts of either Customs and Excise or the intelligence services have been robust enough.
	I am sorry to say that recent figures from Customs and Excise show that, far from an improvement in performance, less cocaine and heroin have been seized recently. In 2000–01, 9,463 kg was seized; the following year it was down to 9,007 kg; and in the first half of the current year the figure was only 3,639 kg, which suggests a marked decrease in seizure rates. I accept that there is an element of serendipity about whether there is a big seizure at a particular time, but the figures do not suggest that Customs and Excise is winning the war. Perhaps more effort should be made.
	I hope that we can all agree that not all drugs are the same in their harmful effects. I find it hard to identify a psychotropic drug that does not have any harmful effects. However, even if we accept that all drugs have some harmful effects, it is nevertheless a nonsense to pretend that class A drugs—the hard drugs—are equally as dangerous as some of the drugs classified as class C, or which are about to be reclassified as such. The problem with not recognising that fact is that it undermines everything else that we say about the subject. It is no good asserting to young people that cannabis is as dangerous as heroin, because they do not believe it. They know that that is not true, and to do so undermines everything that we do. We must therefore look at the problem not only of insulting the intelligence of the community whom we are trying to influence but of misdirecting police effort and resources away from where they can be effective in dealing with drugs that are proven to kill, towards those that are not proven to kill and which may have a less harmful effect than fully legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco.
	My fourth point concerns dealing with the user, and this is where the motion of the right hon. Member for West Dorset really comes into effect. We are, I hope, reaching a consensus that dealing with the possession of drugs as if it were a criminal offence requiring a custodial sentence is nonsense. Apart from anything else, to do so puts the person in question into a context in which they will be encouraged to take drugs. Indeed, as has already been discussed, on coming out of prison they may find themselves on drugs that are harder than those that they were on when they went in. There is some evidence of an improvement in the Prison Service's performance in that regard; nevertheless, a very real risk exists.
	It is clear that that point does not apply when there are aggravating circumstances. Much was said in a previous debate about driving under the influence of drugs. We do not treat that problem seriously enough, and there should be greater awareness of it. It has been suggested, not least by the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), that a halfway stage of Xsubstantial possession" should be recognised. That would create a threshold that both the police and the user can identify and understand by establishing a quantity that is considered likely to be used for purposes other than personal, or directly social. In my view, there is a strong argument for that.
	The question, therefore, is: what do we do with the user? The motion of the right hon. Member for West Dorset advances the proposition that any new money should be put solely into the treatment of the young. Although I accept that his proposition would have merit in the context of a wider approach, my worry is that other improvements would not result. I am thinking of the older user, who needs continuing and enhanced assistance. As we know, the availability of facilities across the country is patchy, and in many parts there is an unacceptably long period of referral and an unacceptably weak support system.
	Pilot schemes and initiatives are under way to couple release from prison with continuing rehabilitation. Here, I pray in aid a chief superintendent in my constituency, who has written to me commending the pilot scheme in Bristol known as the prolific offender scheme. The Minister nods, so he is obviously familiar with it. The chief superintendent says that what is desperately needed is for that scheme—which provides continuing support for prolific offenders within a regulated environment outside prison, including support with drug addiction—to be extended across the police force area. That requires money and resources. It requires resources from the Home Office, and support from the health service in providing the right mix of personnel. I do not agree entirely with the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), who said that only medical staff have a role in this regard. A more holistic approach would be of benefit. The probation service clearly has something to say on the subject of prolific offenders in particular, and something to do if we are to protect our communities effectively.

John Mann: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, although drugs action teams should not consist exclusively of health professionals, at least half of the membership of their governing boards, rather than a small minority, should consist of health professionals?

David Heath: I am less worried about that issue than the hon. Gentleman clearly is; I want the right package to be developed for the individual. I want that package to contain a very strong health component, and I want general practitioners to form a part, because they have something very important to say and to do. However, that is not to decry the efforts of others who are taking a sensible position on this issue, and who are able to provide support for the individual. Nevertheless, I do think that we need to establish a package that works for the individual concerned, and for the wider community, because the two are inseparable in this instance.
	There is a further point about the young drug user. Let us not lose sight of the need to prevent a person who is taking drugs from becoming addicted. If we put all our eggs in one basket and adopt the one-club approach, I am not convinced that we will have the additional support for education, youth services and the alternative opportunities afforded to young people that will prevent them from becoming involved with this pernicious trade in the first place. That would worry me; it is right to have several stages in an effective drugs strategy, and prevention is just as important as cure.
	I have a problem with the motion but not with the speech of the right hon. Member for West Dorset, which I found interesting. This debate is almost like a seminar; that is a good thing for this place because it does not happen often enough. It was spoiled by some of the barracking, but let us hope that this positive tone continues.
	We must not focus all our attention on the young addict, however important that is. Let me say gently that I am not convinced that the sums add up when it comes to providing the level of support that the right hon. Gentleman wants. I want to see a more diverse approach for young people to ensure that, as far as possible, we prevent them from becoming addicts in the first place.
	My basic motto in all matters to do with law and order is that the two most effective preventive measures regarding crime and the distribution and supply of drugs are the certainty of being caught—which, in turn, requires resources for policing, intelligence and other services—and the certainty of effective action, whether in sentencing, support or rehabilitation, for the people who emerge at the other end. I am not convinced that the right hon. Gentleman's formula achieves that, but it was a valuable contribution to the debate. I hope that continuing the debate in a similar tone and format will enable us to alight on the strategies that work. Not only will we spend our resources in the most effective way, we will ultimately move towards the position that we have heard about in the Netherlands and Sweden, where heroin and crack cocaine, instead of being cool, are identified as the killers they are.

John Mann: I listened with interest to the speech of the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin). In the spirit of the good dialogue that is breaking out tonight, I shall be visiting the same places, and some others, that he visited in the Netherlands and Sweden. I shall be going with a couple of local general practitioners to see what evidence I can glean that could contribute towards our situation. I do not dismiss the proposals, although I believe that the Conservatives have fallen into the trap of looking for the simple solution to the drugs problem. There are no simple solutions.
	Following a public inquiry into heroin, I recommended that more residential rehabilitation provision should be made available to people in my area. Some people in the drugs world immediately leapt on that and proposed having a residential rehabilitation centre in the middle of the drug-dealing area in my constituency. I have nothing against having everything in my constituency. Rationally, however, as the social services department which holds the budget confirms, my local social services would not refer local people living at home to a residential rehabilitation centre in the middle of the drug-dealing area in their own town. That is clearly nonsense, but it has been proposed and I am trying to unravel bids to the Government for up to #500,000. I and others in my inquiry have drawn the conclusion that money itself is not the biggest problem. The issue is how it is used. Simply targeting young offenders is a fundamental error.
	My most important point relates to the figures. I have analysed drug and alcohol action team returns from Nottinghamshire, which contain interesting figures. I have challenged the way in which figures are quantified and the evidence base many times both in and out of the Chamber, and I shall do so again tonight.
	The DAT returns from Nottinghamshire tell us that all 58 secondary schools—100 per cent.—are providing anti-drugs education. Yet I have visited the schools and met many pupils, without teachers or others being present, and most of them have told me that they have had no anti-drugs education at secondary school. Something is clearly not adding up. I have recommended that the national curriculum should be tightened, and I believe that dialogue is taking place on that at present. I hope that other hon. Members will contribute on what the national curriculum should contain. The principle is clear, however, that a key part of the curriculum for every age between 11 and 16 should be coherent anti-drugs education. My schools clearly do not include it at the moment.

Mark Simmonds: To my mind, the critical question is who goes to schools to educate children on the dangers of drug abuse. Students at secondary schools perceive teachers, police officers and others to be part of the establishment and will not listen to the advice that they give. Systems should be in place to allow rehabilitated drug addicts and members of their families to go to schools to explain to pupils exactly what it means to be an addict or part of a family that contains an addict.

John Mann: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. I am offering local schools something that arose fortuitously on the back of my constituency inquiry. A television company made a hard-hitting programme that began with the drug addicts themselves and their view of life. They did not provide a positive role model. It then moved on to the families, particularly the mothers, of those who have died from drug overdoses and those who have survived for a long time as heroin addicts. Their stories are powerful testimony, spoken by many local people.
	We need to consider what works. On education, I would not rule any method out or any method in. One thing is clear, however: young people in my area do not believe that they are receiving anti-drugs education, and we can therefore say unequivocally that they are, by definition, not receiving it, no matter what DAT returns or anything else might say.
	The DAT returns are even more interesting than that. For primary schools, the return says that 36 out of 36 schools are receiving anti-drugs education. I had to scratch my head when I read that because there are around 60 primary schools in my constituency alone. The statistics are becoming a little obscure.
	More important even than schools is drug treatment. In 2001–02 in Nottinghamshire, we are told, there were 1,473 new clients and 2,297 people receiving treatment. If we add the previous year's figures, we find that the same number of people appear to be receiving treatment. Some people—but not many—will have been on the lists in previous years. The evidence shows that many people who drop out of treatment programmes subsequently re-present themselves. People who want treatment are thus likened to those who are being treated and the numbers add up. Approximately, 2,400 people have asked for treatment, but 2,297—only 110 fewer—are receiving it.
	If we consider the average for waiting lists for all forms of treatment, we can discount the two most recent months, because those people will still be waiting, so again the figures add up. The statistics suggest that everyone who wants treatment is receiving it, yet in my constituency alone I have spoken to more than 150 heroin addicts and their families who tell me that they are not getting treatment. They do not say that they are not getting good or effective treatment or that they would prefer one form rather than another—although such information could be found out—but that they are not getting treatment at all.

Angela Watkinson: When the hon. Gentleman refers to treatment, does he mean maintaining an addict's supply of clean needles and a safe form of the drug, or a programme of withdrawal and abstinence?

John Mann: I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. The DAT returns do not specify that point. That is one of my questions: what is the definition of treatment? In Nottinghamshire, it is clear: any relationship with the treatment services is defined as treatment. That is how we arrived at a figure of 118,000. That is not a criticism of the Government but of the professionals in the field—the drugs establishment—who create the statistics.
	I shall elaborate on waiting times in Nottinghamshire. According to the current DAT annual returns, the longest time that anyone has waited for residential rehabilitation is 10 weeks. However, person A and their parents visited my surgery 14 months ago and I followed person A's progress monthly. Person A requested residential rehabilitation and I followed the dialogue. Person A's parents have visited me regularly. I encouraged that; indeed, in some ways, my office team and I have become part of the support mechanism for person A and their family. Person A went into a residential rehabilitation scheme only in late November, after I had raised their case in my inquiry. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Leaving that aside, however, person A had been asking for residential rehabilitation for 12 months.
	Although person A is happy to be named, I do not think that it is appropriate or relevant to the further details that I shall give about the case. Person A is in a stable situation. During those 12 months, they were not involved in any crimes although they had been previously. Person A is living at home with their parents—previously they were not. The father has been buying drugs for person A to ensure a downward progression of intake before rehabilitation. That is known and the father has, rightly, not been arrested—an instance of appropriate policing. The father has been maintaining person A, stabilising them and preparing them for rehabilitation, precisely as the national treatment agency suggests.
	I have two questions. First, why was person A not referred earlier, and secondly, why did the information given to the Government about waiting lists state that the longest waiting time was 10 weeks when person A had to wait 12 months?

Gary Streeter: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

John Mann: May I continue my point before taking interventions?
	The waiting time for community prescribing is three weeks for priority cases and 11 weeks for non-priority cases. Clearly, I have a problem in judging what is priority and non-priority, but I have asked the questions and believe that person B is likely to be deemed a priority for various reasons.
	Person B has been involved in a range of semi-criminal activities. She may have been involved in prostitution, like many people of her gender. She has not volunteered that information to me, but the advice workers in the field suggest that the vast majority of women heroin addicts in my constituency are regularly involved in some form of prostitution to fund their habit. I believe that information to be accurate. Certainly, if person B has not been involved that activity, she is very rare among her cohort of young women drug users.
	Is person B in the three-week or 11-week category? I have followed person B's case on a weekly, not monthly, basis because she gave evidence at my inquiry nearly five months ago. Person B said, XI was due to meet a drugs worker outside Boots the Chemist for an appointment to discuss a potential detox." Why the meeting was supposed to happen outside Boots the Chemist is a separate issue, but it was not person B's choice. The drugs worker did not turn up. Person B then had to wait while the drugs worker went on holiday.
	Person B happens to have a mobile phone on which the drugs worker has left messages. I have listened to those messages. Frankly, they are extraordinary, showing the most patronising and worst aspects of any bureaucracy and any section of the health service. Person B was asked whether or not she was ready for a detox. That is a professional decision. Who takes it? One person, not a team of people—it is not a multi-agency issue, like DATs or drugs reference groups. So person B has been waiting and waiting.
	I have a letter that was sent to person B on 24 December. It says:
	XWe have recently received a referral on your behalf to our service at the Maltings"—
	the name of the drugs treatment centre—
	XWould you please telephone the referral worker . . . on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday afternoon . . . to confirm that you require contact with our service and to discuss your present situation? If we do not hear from you within the next seven days, we will assume that you do not require our service."
	That letter was written despite my involvement as the Member of Parliament and despite the fact that I and other people from my office and the community rang up the drugs treatment service on behalf of person B. Is person B on the waiting list or not? On what basis has that decision been made? Who is sending out a new referral letter, and how does that equate to the statistics?
	I could give many more examples, but the two that I have mentioned are particularly poignant, as they happen to be ones that I followed in the first instance purely because the people involved came to my surgery.

Bob Ainsworth: We all appreciate the depth to which my hon. Friend has been prepared to go into this issue. I would not stand at the Dispatch Box and seek to suggest that every decision taken in his DAT or any other is right. Of course I do not know the identities of person A and person B, but no one seeks to pretend that we will provide residential rehabilitation on demand. My hon. Friend should talk to a number of people who work on drugs issues. The person whom I quoted, Geoff Cobbe, from my own area would say that providing such treatment on demand would be totally wrong and that many millions of pounds would be wasted on inappropriate treatment, as happened until 1993, when, in effect, such treatment was available in theory, but nothing else besides.

John Mann: I thank the Minister for his intervention. My response is straightforward: person B does not want residential rehabilitation but community-based treatment. If person A is suitable now, why were they not suitable previously? What has changed, especially as the drugs treatment budget was underspent for the last year? I suspect that the only thing that has changed is that a year end is coming, there has been an inquiry and some pressure, and people are spending up the budget. I am not an advocate of residential rehabilitation as a panacea. People come to me for quick solutions, which I do not offer or recommend. A range of possibilities exists. All I wish to see in my area is a menu of treatment provided for people when they want it, straight away, and not further down the line.
	A Home Office written answer to me on 12 December stated:
	XDAT plans are analysed by regional teams consisting of Home Office officials, National Treatment Agency representatives . . . They give careful scrutiny to all the information provided. Any quantitative information is rigorously checked to ensure its accuracy."—[Official Report, 12 December 2002; Vol. 396, c. 476W.]
	I hope that the statistics for my DAT are unique in the country, but they are meaningless, fairy tale statistics, in relation to both education and drugs treatment. That is very worrying, because what I ask for repeatedly—I would ask for it from the Opposition, too, with regard to their proposals—is an evidence base in relation to what succeeds and what does not. Let us be honest with people. Of the 150 addicts in my constituency whom I have seen—the number is increasing, as more and more come to see me—and who are officially documented in the inquiry, all of them want treatment. Some of them will be good bets, and some will be bad bets. Some of them are heroin addicts who became criminals, and some are criminals who became heroin addicts. Some will get through treatment, and some will not. The one thing that is common to them is that they want treatment, and they want honesty. They want people to be straight with them. If they are told that they must wait six months for a residential rehabilitation place, but that, if they do certain things, they will get one, many of them—although they may not be delighted—will be prepared to wait on that basis. The problem in my area is that they do not trust a word that they are told by the drugs treatment services.
	To explain partly why that is, let me read from a leaflet produced by a neighbouring drug reference group within my DAT:
	XIf you choose to use remember . . . The effects from eating dope are hard to judge. You will save your lungs but may lose your head—pace yourself . . . Sometimes using cannabis may not agree with you, it can lead to feeling sick or scared. Tell a friend, find a quiet place to relax, and in an hour the worst should be over . . . Use and possession of cannabis is illegal—a criminal conviction is nothing but hassle . . . One of the biggest risks to a user is being caught."
	The evidence from my constituents is that one of the biggest risks is moving on to other drugs. I would include cigarettes and alcohol in the same equation as cannabis in terms of drug experimentation by young people. Some young people in my constituency move on to heroin, and commit crime as a result of addictive use.
	That kind of publication is not what Government money should be spent on in my area. I want effective education. The question of DARE has already been raised in this debate. It originated in Nottingham, and it is education run mainly by the police in primary schools. There is no evidence base, although I am now constructing my own, with the consent of users: an effective database detailing when they started using, who they are, where they are from, and what interventions there have been. One thing that is interesting is that there seems to be clear evidence that DARE has had success: the 16-year-olds, 15-year-olds and 14-year-olds are not getting addicted to the extent that, three or four years ago, their older brothers and sisters were. It is early days, and we are dealing with the first group of 16-year-olds to go through the programme. However, I understand that the blueprint programme has a budget of #9 million while the budget for the DARE organisation is only #80,000, and that money is provided by local businesses in and around Bassetlaw. Let us consider what could be done if we experimented with DARE for every year in secondary schools, in sure start and, crucially, with parents. I would like pilots to do that.
	DARE has recently extended successfully into parts of south Wales, and I would like the experience to be shared across the country. There is no question that it is beginning to have an impact. My view and that of many of the 16-year-olds to whom I have spoken is that, if the programme continues at ages 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16, we will have informed school cohorts who, at a minimum, will not make irrational decisions. However, DARE provides more than that. It deals with issues such as bullying, pride and self-respect. That is why it works. It is not so much a drugs message but a message about an individuals' self-respect wherever they come from and whatever their parents are like. We face the problem of quite a large number of second-generation kids whose parents are heroin addicts. The sum of #80,000 is not a lot so let us imagine what might happen if the figure was doubled, tripled or quadrupled to allow DARE to expand and pilot other programmes in secondary schools. That would be a cheap, cost-effective and valid use of resources.
	I hope that the Opposition will take heed. They offer a simple solution and they need to get their line right. On 7 January in the Committee considering the Criminal Justice Bill, the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) referred to their policy involving an eightfold increase, but I am sure that that was a slip of the tongue. More worryingly, however, he said that the money was for residential and non-residential treatment. I urge caution against accepting the view that there is a panacea for a particular age group. The proposal equates in my constituency, as in everyone else's, to 12 new places for young people, and we need considerably more than that in residential rehabilitation, community-based treatment and everything else. We need significantly more places and we need them now. The Opposition's policy must be reconsidered.
	I want in my area drugs courts that give people a choice. The moment that young people enter the criminal fraternity, they should be given immediate treatment. Drugs testing should also be introduced in the way that it has been by the chief constable at Worksop police station.
	I have a final request for the Government. Pilots have all too often been based on where the maximum amount of crime is perceived to take place—that is, the cities. One of the problems with pilots in cities is that the population in them is highly transient. The population in my area is highly immobile. Because it is not transient, we can provide better than any city an evidence base that shows what does and does not work. The same people who are in my area now will be there in 10 years. We should not work on the overall statistics that mean that my consistuency is masked by an average that relates to it and to the constituencies of the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) and my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping). The problem is in Worksop, and the drug-related crime rate there is as high as anywhere else. We want to be part of the pilots so that we can provide an evidence base and offer real hope to young people.

Angela Watkinson: The motion recognises the irrefutable link between hard drugs and crime and the need for mandatory treatment and rehabilitation for young heroin and cocaine addicts. I hope to persuade the House that the Government's updated drugs strategy published last December, focused as it is on providing more and more treatment, is deficient and is heading for inevitable failure. As admirable and as necessary as it is, the simple provision of treatment will do nothing to deter drug use or reduce the number of drug addicts.
	Such a strategy cannot succeed without robust prevention measures to stem the never-ending flow of new addicts and an equally robust enforcement of the law. Given that the majority of drug abusers come into contact with the police after committing another crime, such as burglary, shoplifting or assault, tolerance, understanding and the provision of treatment without meaningful sanction will do nothing to deter repeat offending. Indeed, it will encourage it. Nor will it bring offenders to understand the devastation that they have caused to their victims' lives. The violation of a family home and the loss of personal possessions, often of sentimental value and irreplaceable, can permanently deprive the victims of their sense of security and peace of mind.
	To the law-abiding majority in this country, the recent statements by the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice were an outrage. They were a licence for burglars to go about their vile activities without fear of punishment. If the appalling crime of burglary is so widespread that the police do not have the means to deal with it and if our prisons are too overcrowded to accommodate all the burglars, the answer is to increase the number of police on our streets and to build more prisons, not to make burglary a non-crime, which is what happened with cannabis possession. When I opposed the downgrading of the law on cannabis in the Home Affairs Committee report on drugs policy, I asked, tongue in cheek, how long it would be before the strategy was applied to other crimes such as burglary. Little did even I think that it would happen so quickly. I shudder to imagine what will be the next crime to be neutralised in that way out of expedience.
	Let us not kid ourselves that lenient community sentences are anything other than a slap on the wrist. Many are never completed and monitoring of attendance is patchy at best because of a lack of resources. If offenders face no real consequence as a result of their actions, they will see the offence itself as being of no consequence, its effect on their victims as being of no consequence and, indeed, the victims themselves as being of no consequence. That is what the policy will teach them. Never has there been such a gulf between justice and the law.
	Similarly, just as treatment cannot succeed without prevention, so attacking the supply of drugs cannot succeed without also attacking the demand that sustains the market—although it is, of course, a fundamental element of drug strategy. It is unrealistic to regard all drug addicts as victims. They must take some responsibility for their actions alongside the dealers. The market is demand led. That is why prevention is so important in enabling the provision of treatment to be sustainable in terms of cost and the numbers needing it.
	The declassification of cannabis is pivotal to the success of any drugs policy. Whereas it is acknowledged that hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin do the greatest damage, there is overwhelming evidence from both medical professionals and the police that the majority of hard drug users start on cannabis. I am utterly convinced by the gateway theory. That is why the reclassification of cannabis from class B to class C was so wrong. In February 2001, the Government rejected that idea, yet eight months later they changed their mind—a decision which I suspect owes more to the difficulty of managing the scope of the problem than to a reassessment of the inherent dangers.
	The message is now so confusing that many young people think that cannabis is harmless, legal or both. Its mind-altering capabilities are complex and the cannabis on sale today is several times stronger than it was in the past. It is able to induce psychosis, mood swings, confusion, delusions or even hallucinations.

Brian Iddon: Is the hon. Lady aware that there are roughly 23 different forms of cannabis? If a person purchases cannabis in a Netherlands coffee shop, the person selling it will offer advice. It is not true to say that all cannabis available in this country today is of such high quality. There is a wide range of qualities.

Angela Watkinson: I hope that the hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that we should require dealers to explain the strength of the cannabis that they sell. I would much prefer it if they did not sell it at all.

Paul Flynn: The point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) is making is a fair one. In a market in which the consumer has a choice, most drug users, particularly alcohol users, choose the mildest form of drug, so most people use wine or beer rather than spirits. During prohibition in America all that was on offer was distilled spirit, which was highly concentrated. In a market such as that in Holland, in which there is a choice, the majority of people use a safer drug and take it in a way that avoids smoking, which is the most dangerous way of taking it.

Angela Watkinson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution, but I would claim that all forms of cannabis are undesirable and harmful. I should like to eradicate it altogether—a rather long-term strategy, I know, but that should be our aim.
	The number of marijuana-related emergency room incidents in this country reached nearly 90,000 in 1999. Worst of all, the use of marijuana so often leads to a hard drug habit and all the misery that that entails. A sentencing regime that does not use the lighter penalties for class C drugs will inevitably find itself dealing with more and more class A offences, some of which could have been avoided. Reducing the number of cannabis users would in turn reduce the number of heroin and cocaine addicts. Cannabis is by far the most widely used drug, and a policy that does not take seriously the part that it plays in the spectrum of drug use cannot possibly succeed.
	The scale of drug-driving is also increasing at an alarming rate. In a snapshot survey by police over the Christmas period, more than half of those stopped for erratic driving were found to have drugs present in their bloodstream. The variety of illegal drugs commonly in use means that a roadside test would be much more difficult to devise than the test used for alcohol, but research is urgently needed to find an effective test to help the police to start combating that growing problem.
	The first essential in prevention policy is proper drugs education. Some of the literature that passes for education in our schools is information of the most undesirable kind. We have heard something on that subject from the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann). Lifeline, a Manchester-based charity, in a booklet about cannabis, showed how a joint is rolled. The first piece of advice in XHow to survive your parents discovering you're a Drug User" is XDon't get caught in the first place." Other Lifeline publications are full of four-letter words, shockingly graphic illustrations and instructions on how to inject.
	A favourite phrase is Xinformed choice". Anyone advocating informed choice for other widespread illegal activities such as speeding or shoplifting would be severely censured. Why is it tolerated in the case of drugs? Even if children were properly informed about drugs—and most are not—there should be no choice because drugs are illegal. Anyway, children are not mature enough to choose: they are not miniature adults and they should never be put in the position of having to make critical life decisions.
	In 2000, DrugScope, our largest drug charity, distributed a booklet on cannabis in its XWhat and Why" series. One illustration showed a young man in the midst of a crop of cannabis plants wearing a cap that says XHave fun, take care". What sort of message does that send to our children? Harm reduction education does not tackle drugs; it accommodates them. Ofsted inspections must start to address that problem.
	Thankfully, the majority of teenagers do not use any illegal drugs and never have. Our biggest weapon in prevention is normalisation. We must help those under pressure to see that abstention from illegal drugs is normal at any age—childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Prevention can and does work, as seen in America between 1979 and 1991. Parents got fed up with trendy excuses for drug taking, and collaborated with teachers, the police, Customs and Excise, social workers and students to foster the idea that taking drugs is not normal or socially desirable, and that it is indeed harmful. It worked. The number of drug users fell from 23 million to 14 million, a 60 per cent. reduction. Use of cannabis and cocaine halved.
	An American survey done at the time of the campaign is very instructive. More than 70 per cent. of high school students who were non-users of cannabis were concerned about psychological and physical damage. Parental disapproval deterred over 60 per cent. Some 40 per cent. were put off by illegality factor. More than 50 per cent. were worried about progression to stronger drugs and slightly fewer thought that they might become addicted. Real drugs education must carry robust warnings of the disastrous effects of ignoring all the available advice—damage to health, education, career prospects and financial stability, the slippery slope to criminal activity to fund a habit, the misery and worry caused to family and friends and the cost to society at large through the NHS and the police. Young people need to be told that when they are offered drugs, the dealer whom they may have thought was a friend does not want them to have fun or a good time but simply wants their money—not only today or tomorrow, but next week and next month. In other words, the dealer wants a regular income and gives no thought to the suffering that lies ahead.
	Policy has to tackle two separate but very closely related issues: treating and rehabilitating existing addicts and preventing young people from becoming addicts. Without prevention measures to address the latter, the former will never be achieved. Let us have as our national aim a drug-free society. It may take a very long time to achieve, but it is a goal on which we should not compromise.

Paul Flynn: The policies advocated by the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) are precisely those that this country and all parties followed from 1971 until very recently. The result of those policies is that the number of hard drug users has moved from fewer than 1,000 in 1970, when there was virtually no drug crime and drug death was very rare, to the current position, where there are 280,000 hard drug users. Perversely, it is prohibition that has caused that increase in drug use.
	I shall follow the example set by those on the two Front Benches and not speak from notes, but respond to the debate. It has been suggested, I know in good faith, that education is one of the ways in which we should invest very large sums on tackling drugs. The DART—drug abuse resistance taskforce—and DARE schemes have now been running in America for almost 30 years. A recent independent assessment suggested that they were ineffective. The people running the schemes said that they used to be ineffective, but that they now had a new approach. They made the same excuse eight years ago and also 15 years ago, but unfortunately the only genuinely independent and scientific examination that has been conducted of the effect on a control group of a drug education group has shown that there is no effect whatever.
	The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mr. Simmonds) proposed the new wheeze of sending ex-drug users to teach in schools. A celebrated study was conducted in America in about 1955, when drug use was endemic in cities but rare in the countryside, whereby ex-drug users were sent into the country areas. Ex-hippies in their late 20s or 30s, with long hair, handsome attractive figures and guitars, were talking to 15-year-olds and saying XWe've been through all this; we've been through all the drugs and had it all, degradation and sexual orgies, and it was dreadful. You must not take drugs because your parents do not want you to have them and they are wicked and dangerous." Wickedness is just what 15-year-olds are after. Danger is what they long for, because they all know that they are immortal and will live for ever. Not unsurprisingly, drug use followed those anti-drug campaigns as surely as night followed day.

Mark Simmonds: The hon. Gentleman has long been a known expert on this subject, which is why I am slightly surprised that he is drawing a parallel between what happened during the pre-hippy movement in the 1950s in the United States and the serious situation of many heroin addicts in semi-rural and town areas, about which we heard from the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann). Indeed, the problem is rife in my rural constituency.

Paul Flynn: In trying to follow the spirit of this debate and the way in which it was opened, I want to say that none of us has fallen back into the armchair of our own certainties or believes that we have the answer. What we want is some humility, and an admission that decisions taken by serious and conscientious people in this House have resulted in an enormous increase in drug use. We have the worst instance of drug use in Europe. We have the most deaths per head of the population and the worst problems.
	I have been attending these debates for 15 years. The Government announce new plans, wheezes, money and programmes; the Opposition congratulate them and everyone makes speeches similar to that of the hon. Member for Upminster. They make hon. Members look tough and guarantee favourable headlines in the tabloids. However, that has not worked; indeed, nothing has worked.
	We are often in the distressing position of receiving calls about this matter from constituents, usually mothers. A mother will tell us that her daughter, who has been prostituting herself for years, has had a baby, and asks when she will receive treatment. Sometimes a mother will ring up about a suicidal son, who has had a distressing experience and perhaps reached the point where he might change. She asks whether treatment is available. Those are real cases in which I have been unable to help.
	Sometimes a mother says that she is buying heroin for her son because she has a clean source and asks what she should do. What can we say? We make the law. Can we tell people to break the laws that we make? I would break the law if I had a son, grandson or granddaughter in the position that I described. If we do not respect the laws, how dare we continue to impose them on the nation?
	My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary mentioned Afghanistan. We must examine our past failures and not simply say that we shall have great success in Afghanistan. When we went into that country, the Taliban had reduced the cultivation of poppies in their area by 90 per cent.; the Northern Alliance have increased theirs by 300 per cent. There is no reduction in the growth of poppies. We risk committing the same mistake as the United States did in Colombia two decades ago. The United States decided to sort out the problem in Colombia and coca growth in Bolivia. People used coca as an appetite suppressant because they were starving, and as an antidote to altitude sickness. Only western man—I am sure that it was a man—discovered that when the beans were ingested without touching the saliva in the mouth, coca was a powerful drug.
	If we take the same line in Afghanistan and follow President Bush, we will not stop the flow of drugs because they are being sucked in by demand in Europe and other countries. If cultivation ended in Afghanistan, it would improve in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Burma, the current source of many drugs. If we took the war against drugs to those areas, we would end up with the Colombianisation of central Asia. In Colombia, a war is being waged between three armies, two of which are financed by the drugs trade.
	The right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) took a pragmatic approach and did not go in for the cheap party political knockabout that would give him a headline in tomorrow's Daily Mail. He has seriously considered two interesting countries, Sweden and the Netherlands. Sweden has achieved the most remarkable reduction in the use of a drug anywhere in the world. It has reduced by more than 50 per cent. the use of the most deadly and addictive drug, which, according to its maker's instructions, kills half its users. Sweden has achieved that by accident rather than deliberate policy. It is almost embarrassed about it. I refer to the use of smokeless tobacco.
	In 1980, 36 per cent. of Swedish males smoked cigarettes. That figure is now 17 per cent. The hon. Member for Upminster said that she was against drugs, no matter how they were taken or whatever their strength. Tobacco continues to be used in Sweden but by a method that avoids smoking. Nicotine is no more poisonous or harmful than caffeine, but when it is set on fire, the smoke contains carcinogens and other damaging chemicals. Drawing them into the lungs causes problems such as cancer and respiratory diseases. On average, Sweden's male population suffers half the deaths of the rest of Europe through smoking. The Swedish female population, which does not use the form of moist snuff, has exactly the average number of deaths.
	I am critical of Sweden in one respect. It is the only country in the world that has adopted a line we have never adopted—that of total non-drug use. As a result, it starts from a very low base. According to an analysis of changes that have taken place in Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom between 1987 and 1999, Sweden and the United Kingdom experienced the greatest increase in drug-related deaths—50 per cent. higher than in Switzerland and the Netherlands. The story is not all good: Sweden has its problems with illegal drugs.
	Again, there is no simple solution. The right hon. Member for West Dorset mentioned the Dutch experiment. Significantly, he accepted at least one thing. The average age of addicts in the Netherlands is rising: it was 28 in the early 1980s, and is now over 40. It may shock Members to learn that there is a home for geriatric heroin users in Rotterdam. They spend their lives there, and their grandchildren turn up to visit them. Perhaps it is shocking that they are still alive at that age.
	We should not dismiss those who are addicted to any drug, whether it is alcohol, tobacco—many people are addicted to tobacco, and will be for life—or an illegal drug. The best we can do is what has been done in the Netherlands, in Australia to a small extent, and in Germany, where such people are treated as patients rather than criminals. One celebrated centre in Rotterdam treats some 250 addicts who are supplied with clean needles and take their drugs under supervision, in hygienic surroundings. I visited the centre. It was upsetting and shocking to watch people abuse their bodies in that way, but I was struck by the contrast between what happened there and what happens in our constituencies. After people have taken their drugs they have someone to talk to; there is a social club and training in information technology, and they even produce their own newspaper. In our country we see people taking drugs in foul back alleys, using dirty needles in unhygienic conditions and being helpless afterwards: someone is likely to kick the living daylights out of them.
	We can treat this issue with the seriousness that it deserves and with the humility that we should bring to it because of our past failures. It is not the best idea to go to the practitioners in the drug industry who, like us politicians, have been associated with failure for 30 years. It is time for fresh thinking. It is time to do what the present Government and the Opposition are doing—to look at what has happened elsewhere, and pursue policies that have worked to reduce drug use and the number of drug deaths.

George Osborne: I have enjoyed listening to the debate. I was particularly struck by the speech of the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann). Like many others, I knew of the inquiry he had conducted in his constituency. He demonstrated the importance of a practical knowledge of the issues, and how that could inform a speech in the House. I also thought it courageous of him to attack the professionals and their advice rather than attacking Ministers and other politicians—we are not supposed to do that in politics. That was brave, and not just in a XYes Minister" way.
	I know that others want to speak, but let me say a brief word about Styal women's prison in my constituency. I want to refer to it partly because, apart from Holloway, it is the largest women's prison in the country—it is known as the Holloway of the north; I am not sure whether that is something of which it can be proud—and partly because I visited it just before Christmas, at about the time when a report on a full inspection of it was published by the chief inspector of prisons. I have to say that it was one of the most depressing and enlightening experiences that I have had as a Member of Parliament.
	Styal women's prison has about 450 female prisoners. It has doubled in size in the last couple of years from a reasonably small local training prison to one of the major women's prisons in the country. There is a whole debate to be had, incidentally, about why the female prison population has risen so dramatically. When I spoke to the governor at Styal, what struck me was the endemic heroin abuse that takes place both in the prison and among those who come into it. The chief inspector of prisons estimated in her report that some 41 per cent. of prisoners in Styal were heroin addicts. The chief executive of the Prison Service thinks that that is a gross underestimate by the chief inspector, and the governor told me that probably more like 70 to 80 per cent. of her inmates at least came in as heroin users.
	The sad thing about Styal is the total devastation of the lives of the people there. The governor has spent all her professional career in the Prison Service working in male prisons. Interestingly, she said that there were problems with law and order and with control and security in male prisons, but that in female prisons she had found that the individual prisoners were much less predictable and that they often came from much more difficult family circumstances. I was shocked to meet people who had been born in the mother and baby unit of the prison and were now back as inmates. I was physically shocked to meet people whose faces were almost skeletal through heroin use. I was also shocked to meet a lady who was about to be released the next day but did not want to be, because she knew that the following night she would be back on the streets of Manchester working as a prostitute, and that her food would be cold baked beans out of a tin in a bedsit somewhere. Indeed, she was asking the governor what she could do to stay in prison, saying, XWhat would happen if I attacked one of the warders?" The governor tried to discourage her from doing that.

Mark Simmonds: Is my hon. Friend aware that it is not unusual for heroin addicts to ask for longer sentences to be passed, so that they can spend longer in prison, for the very reasons that the case in the prison in his constituency highlights?

George Osborne: I am certainly aware of that now, after my visit to Styal. I have not had direct experience of heroin use, although I have had experience of other drug misuse in my family, and my visit to Styal was very striking.
	My point is that I would have thought that prisons would be the place to start if we are going to have a national drugs strategy. I am not making a party political point, because I do not think that previous Conservative Governments have helped these people any more than the current Government are doing. I would have thought that we would have started with these people. They are some of the most desperate heroin users, who happen to be in the total care of the state for a period of time because they are in prison, but Styal has no drug detoxification programme—a point that I made in an intervention on the Minister. When the chief inspector came to the prison, she found that to be one of the most serious problems that the prison is facing.
	The governor, Madeline Moulden, is doing a brilliant job, and the chief inspector praised the relationship between the governor and the staff, and between the staff and the prisoners. It is clear from going round the prison with the governor that she knows the names and histories of all the prisoners, but she is really fighting against the tide because she does not have the resources to provide a proper drug rehabilitation programme, despite that being the No. 1 problem in the prison. I want briefly to quote the chief inspector, who said that
	Xat the time of the inspection, Styal had no proper detoxification unit, and the Governor's bids for funding such a unit had been rejected. We describe"—
	in the report—
	Xwomen, in their early days there, fitting and vomiting in their cells, with staff unable to do more than observe and try to alleviate their distress. This is unacceptable. The lack of proper detoxification had profound and damaging effects, both in the short and medium term. Women were unsafe, in terms of their physical and mental health and the risk of self-harm and bullying. Their chances of effective education and training during their stay in prison were undermined, as initial assessments were carried out when they were virtually incapable of participating. It is clear that the absence of properly resourced and supervised detoxification was preventing Styal from effectively carrying out many of the tasks that it wants to, and needs to."
	I accept the Minister's comment that it is not necessarily a ministerial decision as to what resources are put into the prison, but Ministers set an overall framework. If it was expected within that overall framework that all prisons of a certain size should have a proper drug detoxification unit, that would of course have an impact on Styal. The director general of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, said in December when the inspector's report was published that it was fair and that he shared
	Xthe inspectorate's anxiety about the need for proper detoxification facilities. I am determined to do all I can to find the resources, but they are not currently available."
	It costs about #25,000 to keep a prisoner in Styal every year. Surely, as a society and across all political parties and divides, we must start considering how we are spending the money on tackling drugs misuse in this country. If some of that #25,000 were spent on proper drug rehabilitation, a real strategy to help those women in Styal to kick the heroin habit and, in particular, helping them after their release—not just weeks, but hours after they leave prison, which is another matter to which the inspector referred—we would go a lot further in dealing with at least some effects of heroin abuse.
	I listened with interest to what others said about preventing people from using in the first place, but my speech is about dealing with those in our care in our Prison Service, particularly in women's prisons, where we can deal with such problems. We have good ideas for how to get them off their drug habit and we should implement them.

Brian Iddon: This has been a good debate and I have enjoyed listening to it. It is interesting to consider how the spectrum of the drugs debate has moved. Due to my professional background, I have been interested in drugs, both illicit and licit, all my life. When I was elected to the House in 1997, there was a hard attitude to the misuse of illicit drugs by young and old alike on the streets. So hard was it that the focus seemed to lie strongly on the criminal justice aspects—lock them up and hope that the drugs problem goes away, but clearly it was not about to go away.
	I praise the Government for the attention that they have given to the problem and the money that they have put into all the wide-ranging services that we need to deal with it. I have observed the debate since 1997 and it has slid towards the treatment end of the spectrum, which I very much welcome. We have not heard the statement much this evening, but #1 spent on treatment saves about #3 on the criminal justice system, so that must be money well spent. I have been a great advocate of treatment and I have argued for more of it since being elected to the House, so I was pleased when the national treatment agency was set up over 18 months ago and I am looking forward to it beginning to deliver in the next few years. Its establishment is a welcome development.
	The right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) made some interesting remarks and touched on a theme that has not been developed in the debate. He hinted as to the fact that there is a connection between the misuse of drugs and mental illness, but nobody else picked that point up. Sadly, I have to tell the Minister that it is not picked up strongly by the recently published updated drug strategy either.
	The all-party drugs misuse group studied what is called dual diagnosis a few years ago, however, and that is what the right hon. Gentleman was referring to. About 40 to 50 per cent. of the people who are misusing drugs are also mentally ill, and the drug addiction cannot be treated without the mental illness being treated. One thing that we need is more and better-trained people who can recognise a dual or even a poly diagnosis when they see one and treat holistically people who are also misusing drugs, but have other serious problems. Some have benefits problems, some have housing problems and so on.
	The right hon. Gentleman also referred to the differences between how the problem is being tackled in this country, the Netherlands and Sweden. We must also remind ourselves that in different countries there are different cultures. Culture and fashion, particularly the youth and dance culture—the mood in the dance clubs and the shifting from one fashionable drug to another—are incredibly important and differ from country to country.
	One of my main concerns is the misuse of drugs in prisons—I am very concerned about what is going on in the Prison Service. More and more people are going to prison simply because they committed crimes to support a habit. I want to put on record a letter that I received on 6 September from one of my constituents, a father, who said:
	XThe reason I am writing this letter today is because my youngest son . . . who is 27 years of age has just overdosed on heroin. We buried him yesterday on 5th September."
	My constituent wrote to me the next day, 6 September. He continued:
	XHe died on 29th August, he came out of prison 6 weeks ago. He was given no program to help him, he was not given any money to help him by social security."
	Social security continually refused to pay even for the clothing grant of which he was in great need. Nothing was done to help him. My constituent continued:
	XNothing seems to be done when our children are released from prison. We need something in the north-east where our kids can get real help, and not just get fobbed off all the time."
	He went on to talk about his second son aged 31, a heroin addict for 15 years. He was bringing him down here until recently to be treated in a private clinic with naltrexone implants, which, the father believed, were helping him. One night, however, the son got stoned out of his mind on heroin and left the house in his mother's cardigan, so was obviously easily recognisable. He committed a crime and ended up in prison, where he tried to commit suicide.
	That father almost lost two sons, not one, at the ages of 27 and 31, and wants me to bring to the attention of the House serious deficiencies in the criminal justice system, particularly in prisons, which has already been referred to by my hon. Friend the Minister. If there is one point that I want to get over this evening it is that we must improve treatment availability in all our prisons, or at least put prisoners with serious drug problems in the right prison, where they will be looked after and treated. Hopefully, when they are released, they will have not just the through-care to which my hon. Friend the Minister referred but, more importantly, after-care. If they have not been taking drugs while in prison, their tolerance level changes. If they come out of prison and take the same amount of heroin as they took before, they will overdose and probably die. A lot of young people do not understand the heroin tolerance problem.
	I saw XNewsnight" on 2 December in which Mr. Hamer from Compass, an organisation which carries out CARAT—counselling, assessment, referral, advice and through-care—assessments in the Prison Service, admitted that an awful lot of assessments are carried out in prison, but are not matched by treatment programmes. Mike Trace, the deputy drugs tsar under Keith Hellawell, was also on XNewsnight" and was critical of the lack of monitoring of the spending of the #50 million allocated to the Prison Service for drug treatment. I raised in Health questions the problem of money not going where it is needed and, to be fair, the Department of Health believes that what was said on XNewsnight" was unfounded. Obviously, there is a dispute.
	I know that other Members wish to contribute to our debate so I shall conclude. When we allocated money for cancer networks, people in the national health service complained that the money was not getting to cancer patients, so the Government have now agreed to audit it extremely carefully, as cancer treatment is one of our top priorities. My final plea to the Minister is, therefore, please can we set up audit trails? We have invested enormous sums in drug treatment and education, but we must ensure, for the benefit especially of younger people but also of older addicts, that the money hits the right targets and is used for what it was intended to be used for.

Gary Streeter: I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon), who has extensive knowledge of the subject. I, too, want to make the point that access to treatment is a key weapon in the war against drugs.
	Everyone who has contributed to this debate agrees on one thing: drugs are an enormous menace facing our society and the epidemic sweeping through many parts of the country is extremely serious, and the Government's current response, though well intentioned, has not yet delivered the success that we seek. I urge the Government to think again about the bold idea presented by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) today. They should not dismiss it because it has come from our party, as the current set of policies being pursued by the Government is not producing the fruit that we would want. I really believe that it would be right to set up a pilot to test my party's bold and radical proposal.
	I am concerned about some of the statistics on which the Government are basing some of their decisions. The hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann)—I enjoyed his speech—was right to draw our attention to some of the statistics. The updated drugs strategy paper is a good and worthy document, and I agree with much of it, but on page 11 it makes the unlikely claim that DAT returns suggest that the waiting time for treatment is 2.8 weeks for priority cases and 8.3 weeks for non-priority cases. On which part of the country are those statistics based? The police and the drug action team in Plymouth tell me that if a heroin addict wakes up one day determined to kick the habit and goes to the Harbourside centre—an excellent charity in Plymouth that helps many people—for help, the response will be, XThat is great, and we will do all that we can to help you, but there is a two-year waiting list for the treatment that you need." That is two years, not 8.3 or 2.8 weeks. I worry that Ministers are making decisions based on false information, and I urge them to check the waiting times for treatment of all kinds in all parts of the country. It is no use whatever telling a heroin addict who decides to kick the habit to come back in six months or two years. Think of all the misery and crime that will occur in that time.
	I want to ask the Minister a specific question about Plymouth. Heroin has long been a nightmare for many parts of Plymouth—I have known that for many years—but the police tell me that crack cocaine is now taking hold of the streets in some of our deprived areas. They tell me that we ain't seen nothing yet, and that worries me. They do not think that the DTTO scheme is working very well, and they have started what they call the targeted referral scheme, saying to heroin addicts or crack cocaine users upstream, before they are arrested or prosecuted for an offence, XLook, we know you are stealing or shoplifting to fund your drugs habit—we are watching you, and we will get you—but at this early stage we can offer you treatment." That is not to say that they will not prosecute them, but they give them a chance to make an upstream decision to change their lives at a better time than when they are already in the dock, at which stage we can only offer them the option of facing cold turkey or going on a DTTO.
	The Plymouth police have pursued the pilot scheme, which showed early promise, but there is no funding to develop it. Judge William Taylor went to Downing street on 12 November 2002—I hope that the Minister was aware of that—and asked for a specific sum to pursue that pilot scheme in Plymouth. He is a very experienced judge—the senior judge in Plymouth—and he believes that that could make a real difference in tackling the drug problem that our city faces.
	The Government have not responded to that request for extra money, and if the Minister does nothing else in her winding-up speech, can she please explain what has happened to that request, and say whether the Government are willing to make that money available to help us tackle the problem of drugs in Plymouth?

Nick Hawkins: My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) opened the debate with a plea to the Government to look at this matter constructively, and this has indeed been an extremely thoughtful and thought-provoking debate. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) described it as a seminar, and I agree that, to some extent, we have looked at this issue in that spirit. Other Members spoke in some detail from their personal experiences. In his opening remarks, my right hon. Friend spoke of his fear that, if they do not understand the appalling gap between their rhetoric and the reality, the Government's current actions may mean that literally millions of pounds of taxpayers' money will be wasted. One had only to hear of the practical experience on the ground of the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) to realise the width of that gap, to which my right hon. Friend rightly drew attention. In addition to the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, other Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) and for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), discussed that reality.

Dari Taylor: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Nick Hawkins: No, I am sorry. The hon. Lady was able to intervene earlier a couple of times, but time is so short that, if I am to do justice to the speeches in this debate, I cannot take her intervention.
	My right hon. Friend asked what the Government's contact with drug treatment means in practice for addicts on the streets. Does it mean that addicts are receiving something? It often means, as the hon. Member for Bassetlaw pointed out, that they get letters offering them jam tomorrow—sometimes many months into the future. In most cases, whatever is offered by the different treatment agencies does not take them away from drugs.
	My right hon. Friend talked about the success of Ministry of Defence police DARE projects, but even in those cases referral can often involve a wait of six months before an addict sees a drug counsellor. As he said, that does not help in the reconstruction of addicts' lives. Of course, if those addicts continue to commit crime to feed their drug habit, they cause misery for the many law-abiding people whose homes are subject to the burglaries that my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster talked about. The misery that they cause through the crimes that they commit to fund their drug addiction is at the heart of what we are trying to address in this debate.
	As my right hon. Friend said, what we need is intense and sometimes repeated residential or quasi-residential rehabilitation. However, we frankly admit that even that will not achieve 100 per cent. success; in many cases, addicts will need to go through such intensive rehabilitation more than once. We should target taxpayers' money on the youngest addicts in order to prevent extra people from joining the list of addicts.
	I, along with my right hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset and for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), have seen the success that has been achieved in Sweden. The hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) always makes the same point about Sweden, but if I may I shall lay one canard to rest. He says that one effect of what happens in Sweden is an increase in drug deaths, but we were told firmly by all the experts whom we met in Sweden that the simple explanation is that they measure their statistics much more fully. [Interruption.] I see that the hon. Member for Bassetlaw is nodding in agreement. In Sweden, the death of anyone who has the remotest link with a drug is counted as a drug death. That is why the Swedish figures are higher—they are not evidence of a failure of Swedish policy. As my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster confirmed, Sweden is one of the success stories. I know that the Minister wants to take this matter seriously, and we need to learn the lessons of the success of the Swedish experience.
	In an intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset, my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) pointed out that many dedicated GPs are trying to help with this problem. I had a great deal of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said when he argued for the greater involvement of health professionals in drug action teams. It would help if there were a greater understanding of the health effects of drugs use by those who make the policy. My drug action team in Surrey involves health professionals a great deal, and I think that that could be repeated elsewhere with advantage.
	In a well-advised intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset, the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) talked about the prevalence of drugs in prison. We must ensure that our prisons become drug free. As my right hon. Friend says, we should be able to ensure that at least those who are in custody are not receiving drugs. There has to be more coercion and much tighter supervision of prison visits.
	It is essential that we stop spending British taxpayers' money on providing drugs to prisoners. The Minister may or may not realise it, but the Scottish Executive, to our amazement, have introduced a policy of spending taxpayers' money on providing drugs to inmates of Scottish prisons. I think that most people would be horrified to think that their taxes were being spent on providing drugs for prisoners, but it is happening in Scotland. If the Minister was not aware of that, I hope that he will look into it, because my colleagues in the Scottish Parliament have raised it.
	In an intervention on my right hon. Friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) talked about the difficulties of the drinking and drugs culture, which have been made worse by the Government's relaxation of policies against alcohol. He was quite right to raise that.
	When the Minister responded to my right hon. Friend, he said that he had not previously taken his alternatives terribly seriously but that he would do so now. We welcome that approach. The hon. Gentleman said that he wanted the Government to spend a great deal more. However, he has a problem in that the Government's much trumpeted drugs tsar, Keith Hellawell, was unable to support what the Government were doing; he was unable to accept their abandonment of their own drugs target and said that there was a lot of spin to disguise failure. Given that the Government's drugs tsar, so lauded when he was first appointed, talked about a culture of failure and about setting, missing and abandoning targets, the Minister has a real problem, despite his sincerity.
	As my right hon. Friend said to the Minister in an intervention, we need to pilot what we are suggesting. We are not suggesting that the Government should turn round the supertanker of Home Office policy instantly and abandon everything that it is doing. Instead, let us pilot what we are suggesting against the Government's proposals and see what works. We believe that what we have suggested, along the lines of what works in Sweden, would work here.
	There is undoubtedly a concern about some of the drugs charities and the way in which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster said in an excellent speech, they appear to inform vulnerable schoolchildren about drugs rather than educating them away from drugs. I hope that the Minister will take the initiative of asking the Charity Commission to look carefully at whether some of those organisations are entitled to charitable status. The kind of leaflets that my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster talked about appear to promote drugs or concentrate on the policy of Xharm minimisation", which is really code for legalisation. Perhaps they should not be charities; they certainly should not receive taxpayers' money.
	In an intervention on the Minister and in his speech, my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon pointed out that the reality is that of 38 people who were arrested and received drug treatment and testing orders in Plymouth, 28 have been arrested and have committed further drug-related crimes while under the drug treatment and testing order. That is not an example of the Government's policy working but of the failure of Government policy that my right hon. Friend described.
	The hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) spoke, as he has done repeatedly, about the views of DrugScope—a rather discredited charitable organisation—on cannabis. The Minister said that he always took notice of DrugScope. Perhaps, in the light of the leaflets described by my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster, he should not take so much notice of it.
	The problem is undoubtedly extremely complex. The Minister was right to talk about tackling the routes of supply of drugs. However, we need intensive policing, a point on which the Government—at least in their intentions—and the Opposition agree.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) talked about a retreat from certainty. He will forgive me for saying that the Liberal Democrats are never certain about anything, particularly not on drugs. He also said, however, that the drugs trade is a major motor for gun crime, and I certainly agree with that.
	This has been a high-quality debate and I hope that the Government will take seriously the ideas proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and my colleagues.

Hazel Blears: This has been a fascinating debate. Many speeches from Members on both sides have been thoughtful and full of information. I was particularly impressed by the contributions that Members based on experiences of services in their constituencies, which showed the scale of the difficulty that faces our country in trying to deal with the problems caused by drug addiction.
	At the start of the debate, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) presented his case in quiet, measured tones, full of reason—

David Blunkett: Not like this afternoon.

Hazel Blears: Perhaps that was in marked contrast to what happened in the earlier debate.
	It has been fascinating to hear ideas unfold. Sometimes the most sinister ideas can be presented in the most measured, reasonable tones. The Opposition concentrated—almost exclusively—on the power of abstinence. Although abstinence, like reduction, counselling and treatment, plays a huge role in combating the problems of addiction, addiction is not a simple matter capable of simple resolution. The Opposition motion offers us a simplistic solution to a complex problem that affects the lives of thousands of people up and down the country. Those who are addicted to drugs differ in their needs and problems and in how the system needs to deal with them. Treatment programmes will succeed in the long term only when they are tailored to the individual needs and problems of those involved.
	For that reason, I am concerned by the surface simplicity and reasonableness with which the motion was presented. What lies beneath is an almost exclusive focus on abstinence that does not take into account the real need for maintenance, substitute prescribing and reduction programmes, and for ensuring that people can be treated in the community as well as in residential settings. A whole range of treatment must be brought to bear if we are to succeed in meeting the challenges that face us.
	I must remind the House that it was not until the Government adopted their drugs strategy that we obtained the national treatment agency. For the first time, we are beginning to have national standards in drug treatment—the same kind of national standards that we have in our national service frameworks for mental health, coronary heart disease and cancer. For the first time, we have a proper pooled budget so that we may put resources at the front line where they will make a difference. That budget will increase massively over the years to come. This year, every health authority has had an increase of at least 30 per cent. For next year, the average will be 23 per cent., with the minimum being 15 per cent. The Government are putting in resources because we know that funding is necessary to make the system work.
	We have the national treatment agency, national standards and a pooled budget; we had none of that under the previous Government.

Gary Streeter: I had not realised that things were quite as rosy as the Minister says they are. Why is there a two-year waiting list to access drug treatment in Plymouth?

Hazel Blears: We acknowledge that a great deal of work remains to be done because this field was completely underfunded for years. In the hon. Gentleman's area, the drug action team will receive an increase of 17 per cent. from the pooled budget, and that sort of increase requires resources.
	We want to ensure that the right treatment is available in the right place at the right time. The problem is more complex than has been portrayed by many Opposition Members. Counselling is needed as well as the 12-step abstinence programmes provided by many community resources. We need maintenance and lifetime support programmes, as well as residential places. I do not dismiss the role of intensive residential support for people for whom it is suitable. There are 138 residential services that provide about 3,000 beds, but the treatment must be suitable and meet the needs of the individual involved.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) agreed with the Government that a variety of policies were needed to meet the problems. He emphasised the need for education and prevention work among young people to stop them becoming the next generation of addicts.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) made an excellent contribution. I pay tribute to his work in his constituency, in calling an inquiry and getting local people to give evidence. As he knows, his primary care trust is taking the matter very seriously indeed and has made it the top priority in the health improvement programme. The local strategic partnership and the local council are also taking the problem seriously and there are increased facilities in the area. My hon. Friend acknowledged that all kinds of treatment are needed—counselling, prescribing, abstinence and personal help. Help in finding employment and housing is crucial to enable young people to rebuild their lives.
	I agreed with the first point in the speech made by the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson): we need prevention and enforcement as well as treatment. However, I cannot agree that abstinence is the only way forward. For a rounded policy, we must have harm reduction programmes and maintenance prescribing. Does she think that we should not advise people on how to reduce drug-related deaths, that we should not offer counselling against overdose, or that we should not give people first-aid training so that they can help their friends and relatives to survive?
	My hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) was a little too pessimistic when he said that nothing that had been done in the past 30 years had worked. He was right to point out that we need drugs education. The blueprint programme has been well evaluated and will consider what kind of education works. My hon. Friend, with his innovative view, was almost at the opposite extreme from the hon. Member for Upminster.
	The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) made some important points about his local community. I think that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Ainsworth), has agreed to look into the provision of both a detoxification unit in the local prison and immediate treatment for people on release from prison.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) has constantly pressed for more treatment and for new developments in the drugs field. I am grateful to him for raising the issue of dual diagnosis. Many people with drug problems also have mental health problems. For the first time, the Labour Government have made mental health a top clinical priority in our national health service.
	My hon. Friend spoke of a tragic case in his constituency. He also made the important point that we should check exactly where the money goes. We could consider strengthening the role of the national treatment agency to tackle that problem.
	The hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) asked for more resources. Under the Labour Government, he is receiving them; that would not have been the case under the previous Conservative Government.
	The hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) said that we should learn lessons from elsewhere. Yes, we should, and the Government are beginning to learn those lessons. We are putting in the investment while making sure that the treatment on offer to people is appropriate and relevant.
	In the last few minutes of the debate, I want to highlight a programme that deals with street crime in Lancashire. In Blackpool, the tower project does not merely provide immediate treatment for people who have been convicted of offences, but targets the most prolific offenders in the community and gives them a choice: they can take part in structured drug treatment, or continue to have police surveillance, with checks made on them and their lives made very difficult indeed. It has got 54 of its most prolific offenders into drug treatment in Blackpool, and the effect on the area's crime statistics is absolutely stunning. Burglary in dwellings is down by 46 per cent. and other burglaries are down by 24 per cent.

Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	The House divided: Ayes 143, Noes 375.

Question accordingly negatived.
	Question put, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments):—
	The House divided: Ayes 368, Noes 142.

Question accordingly agreed to.
	Mr. Speaker forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	Resolved,
	That this House recognises that focusing on Class A drugs, educating young people about the dangers of all drugs, preventing drug misuse, combating the dealers, reducing availability and treating addicts are all essential in tackling drugs; and welcomes the Government's updated Drug Strategy and the 44 per cent. increase in planned expenditure on combating drugs, from #1.026 billion in the current financial year to nearly #1.5 billion in the year starting April 2005.

DELEGATED LEGISLATION

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),

National Lottery

That the draft National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Increase of Endowment) Order 2003, which was laid before this House on 11th December, be approved.— [Mr. Kemp.]
	Question agreed to.

COMMITTEES

Ordered,

Transport

That Helen Jackson be discharged from the Transport Committee and Ian Lucas be added to the Committee.— [Mr. John McWilliam, on behalf of the Committee of Selection.]

TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE (EAST KENT)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Kemp.]

Stephen Ladyman: Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to raise another matter in an Adjournment debate. I also thank my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Transport for being present to respond. I realise that he is trying to get into the parliamentary book of records for making the most responses to Adjournment debates, so he will not be too upset. He also knows how important this matter is to my constituency.
	Before I speak about the needs for transport infrastructure improvements in east Kent, perhaps a little background is called for to explain exactly why we have those needs. Unless the House listens to all my speeches in great detail—I raise this issue in most of them—it will not be aware that Thanet has the third highest unemployment in England and among 288 travel-to-work areas throughout the country. Thanet's unemployment level is three times the Kent average and 60 per cent. of people in Thanet who are in work are working for less than the average income. Across east Kent, 40 wards are classed as high social deprivation wards using Government criteria. Thanet scores in the top 25 per cent. most deprived districts in England in all six deprivation categories given by the Government and we have the second highest deprivation index overall in the south-east.
	To address that situation, wards in Thanet and parts of Dover have been given objective 2 and assisted area status, and projects throughout east Kent have secured single regeneration budget funding, but unless we address the underlying problem that causes economic decline in east Kent, all that we are doing with such additional sums is treating the symptoms and not the illness, which in my view is the poor transport infrastructure.
	Our problem is that Thanet is seen by many investors as peripheral to south-east England, rather than, as I believe, central to the European Union. My plea to the Minister is that we should try to take the opportunity to construct a transport infrastructure in east Kent that will put it at the heart of the European Union and address firmly and in the long term the economic decline of the area. That is the vision. I believe that we have a unique opportunity to create a transport hub of road, rail, sea and air unlike anything else in the United Kingdom. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will try to realise that vision in the approaching months and grasp this important opportunity.
	Let us consider roads. We have a beautiful, new Ramsgate harbour approach road. From the edge of Thanet towards London, there are some good dual carriageways along the Thanet way to the motorway network. However, the roads around the east Kent access project between Ramsgate and Thanet Way, and Ramsgate and the Sandwich bypass, remain single carriageways. That project must be finished to complete our road infrastructure.
	As well as linking Ramsgate to the port of Dover, and to the motorway network and the M25, this project will solve another problem: the congestion around the Pfizer site at Sandwich. Pfizer is a pharmaceutical company, which constitutes the biggest United States investment in the United Kingdom. It is the biggest employer in Kent and the great congestion around its site is a genuine problem. Completing the east Kent access project will therefore not only deal with economic decline in the area but be a major benefit to local people.
	We also need to complete our road infrastructure by dualling the A2 all the way into Dover.

Gwyn Prosser: I am pleased to be part of a joint campaign in east Kent that presses for better road and rail links. One of the campaign's key aims is dualling the A2. My hon. Friend knows that we have fought for that for more than 25 years. The port of Dover is expected to expand in the next weeks and months, and freight is expected to double in the next 10 years. Does my hon. Friend therefore agree that we are considering a burning issue and that we need to get on quickly with putting plans in place and regenerating east Kent?

Stephen Ladyman: I agree with my hon. Friend and I am grateful to him for making those points. Dualling the A2 is vital not only to the port of Dover but to the success of the economy in Thanet.
	One of my main worries is the train service. If my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary asks what is wrong with the existing service, I shall reply, XOnly two things—the operator and the track." The fastest journey time from Ramsgate to London is one hour 45 minutes. Most services take longer. Let us contrast that with the journey from London to Doncaster, which is 100 miles longer but can be completed 15 minutes quicker.
	I worked for Pfizer before I became a Member of Parliament. When we showed people around the site, we used to joke that Pfizer located to Sandwich in 1952 because of the high-speed rail link to London. The same trains are unfortunately still running. The trains are old, the service is poor and Connex has defaulted on a raft of promises. It has been fined for late running, but not many people in Kent believe that there has been much improvement in its reliability. Its train modernisation programme has started but I have no confidence in its completion. I also have no confidence that the slam-door trains will be replaced in accordance with the Government's timetable.
	Connex won its franchise by making promises that it could not keep, at a price that it could not afford. That allowed it to outbid companies that made realistic cost commitment projections. When it first began to renege on its promises, the length of its franchise was extended because that was necessary to make future investment viable. Despite that, the Strategic Rail Authority had to invest #58 million in it a few weeks ago to prop up the service.
	A year or two ago, Connex said that it had no interest in running fast trains to London. When it became clear that it would be required to do that if it wanted its franchise renewed, it suddenly began to claim that it would try to run such trains. It then started blocking the efforts of other companies, such as NetRail, which was trying at timetable conferences to bid to run a fast train service to London.
	Despite this catalogue of failure, Connex recently had the brass neck to announce that it expects to be the preferred bidder for the new franchise in 2006. I hope that the Under-Secretary will scrutinise carefully any bid from Connex and examine it in the light of its performance in recent years.
	A modern, fast train link is a prerequisite for regeneration in east Kent, especially in Thanet. It is also vital if we are to realise the potential of Manston airport and Ramsgate sea port. I do not believe that Connex will provide that. And unless the Government acknowledge the need for channel tunnel rail link domestic services to proceed to Ramsgate, no one else will be able to provide such a service either.
	A fast train link using the channel tunnel rail link would bring potential inward investors to Thanet. They frequently cite the poor train service as a reason for not investing there. As I have said, the fast link is a prerequisite for the expansion of Manston airport and Port Ramsgate. It would extend the travel-to-work area, allowing key workers to commute to Thanet and the east Kent area generally, thereby making business expansion practicable. It would also expand the commuting area, enabling the unemployed of Thanet to travel out of Thanet more easily to find work elsewhere.
	The main barrier to the provision of a fast train service is the Strategic Rail Authority, which is currently undertaking a review of the use of CTRL domestic services. I understand that a report has been presented to Ministers in the last few days, and that it may suggest that a fast train service should go via Ashford to Canterbury West and stop there—although we have, at Ramsgate, maintenance sheds that the trains are almost certain to use. If the trains did not proceed to Ramsgate it would be a disaster for us in Thanet and for Ramsgate, and it would be the epitome of ridiculousness to have empty trains running from Canterbury West to Ramsgate when they should be carrying passengers. Starting the fast train service at Ramsgate would improve the economic viability of CTRL domestic services, and would do a huge amount to regenerate the local economy.
	Port Ramsgate, as the Minister knows, is a municipal port. It was taken back into council ownership when Sally decided to retrench to the Baltic some years ago. Since then it has developed a highly successful freight business, but it has no passenger service. One reason why it is difficult to attract a new passenger service is the fact that all the costs of starting such a service must be clawed back from the operator in one year, because the council is not allowed to borrow either to invest in the port's development or to spread the cost of starting a new service over several years.
	I know that we intend, under the Local Government Bill, to allow local councils to borrow again if they can afford to repay the money, but that will not start for another year at least. We already allow municipal airports to borrow; I wonder why Ministers will not consider allowing municipal seaports to borrow, so that they can spread start-up costs over a number of years. That would allow investment to be made in facilities at the port of Ramsgate.
	The Minister will know my view that continental and British seaports are not competing on a level playing field. I should like that to be reviewed. The Government have promised a review of municipal seaports for some time, but have not been able to start it yet. I should also like that review to begin as soon as possible.
	Manston airport presents a huge opportunity. I know that the Minister is aware of that, because he recently opened on our behalf some major investments by the developer there. Manston already has a good freight business and a sound air-side maintenance business, but according to the local council's estimate it also has the potential to expand its capacity to 6 million passengers a year. That would make a valuable contribution to the south-east's air capacity, and could create 10,000 jobs including those in the freight and air-side maintenance businesses.
	Here we have an opportunity provided by a potentially successful airport carrying passengers as well as freight, a potential successful seaport carrying passengers as well as freight, an advanced train service running rapidly into London and a decent road infrastructure—all located close to the busiest channel port in the country, Dover, and the channel tunnel rail link. It is a potential transport infrastructure hub, unique to the United Kingdom, and it could play a vital role in regenerating the local economy. It could solve our problems in the long term: the Government would no longer have to invest funds by means of, for instance, assisted area status to support us, and it would go a long way towards lowering the grossly awful levels of unemployment in Thanet.
	I hope that the Minister will acknowledge what we are trying to achieve in Thanet, and ask his Department to work hard on building this strategy in the coming months.
	.

David Jamieson: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) not only on securing this Adjournment debate but on the clear and well-considered way in which he has presented his points. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Prosser) has been his useful aide on this occasion. My hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet asked whether I listened to his speeches. I can assure him that I listen to them avidly, and that those that I do not happen to catch I read in Hansard the next morning. My hon. Friend has painted a powerful picture in the Chamber on many occasions of the levels of unemployment in his constituency and the need for inward investment there. I can assure him that those are the Government's priorities, and using transport to help regeneration is one of our central aims.
	My hon. Friend has clearly explained the importance of Thanet and east Kent to both the national and regional economy. The Government certainly support that view. We also agree that the transport infrastructure is a vital component for assisting in the regeneration of this area. Before I respond to my hon. Friend's specific points, I should like briefly to outline what is already happening to improve transport. We have made it clear in the 10-year plan for transport that we are fully committed to improving the nation's transport infrastructure, especially through effective local transport schemes. We have introduced local transport plans to support this commitment. These five-year plans give local authorities such as Kent the freedom to deliver local transport schemes that meet the needs of their communities. We have already allocated more than #24 million for 2003–04 to Kent county council to increase investment in local transport schemes and maintenance. I am sure that my hon. Friend will have noticed that that is an increase of #4 million over the 2002–03 allocation of #20 million. It is also more than double the allocation for 2000–01.
	I understand that Kent county council is spending more than #750,000 in Thanet in 2002–03. That includes spending on safety measures, rural schemes, the A254 Margate to Ramsgate cycle route, a safer-routes-to-school project at Drapers Mill primary school in Margate, and the introduction of the Birchington 20 mph zone. We also continue to support schemes that will aid regeneration in north Kent, such as the south Thames development route and Fastrack. In recent years, we have given provisional approval for the A256 east Kent access scheme, and the Leybourne and West Malling bypass. In total, the amount provisionally committed to major transport schemes in Kent amounts to just over #61 million.
	The Fastrack guided bus system is an example of an innovative public transport scheme, and we have committed #14.5 million to it. Its first phase will link Dartford station with Greenhithe station and Gravesend, taking in Bluewater and the Darenth Park hospital on its route. The concept of guided buses is being taken forward by Medway council, which is already planning a rapid transit system designed to link up with Fastrack and aid regeneration in Medway. We have also given #500,000 for complementary highway works to improve access to the proposed Turner centre in Margate. The centre is a key community development and will enable further regeneration of the waterfront at Margate. The south coast multi-modal study has now reached its recommendations and been supported by the south-east England regional assembly. Its recommendations encourage the use of rail for accessing the existing ports of Folkestone, Dover and Ramsgate. They also encourage the use of those ports for the transportation of freight, especially bulky goods such as aggregates.
	Let me deal with the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover, who will be aware that all road schemes are undertaken strictly on a priority basis. Currently, even at peak times, the levels of traffic congestion on the A2 do not justify the dualling that he mentioned. However, the Highways Agency is discussing with the port authority and other interested stakeholders how we can improve the flow of traffic by other interim measures, which I hope will bring my hon. Friend some relief.
	The report notes that the channel tunnel rail link provides the opportunity to operate domestic services that can also serve Folkestone, Dover, Canterbury and east Kent. That would significantly enhance accessibility in the area. In addition, depending on the future role of Manston airport, it may warrant a new rail access.
	The consultants' report also supports Connex's proposal to increase the number of trains between Dover and Ashford from two to four. It also advocates completing the east Kent access improvements, including provision of priority lanes, but it will be for the Secretary of State to take the decisions on the way forward.
	I want to answer specifically some points that were raised by my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet. The concern that he expressed on greater borrowing powers for local authorities will be addressed by the Local Government Bill, which had its Second Reading last week and which will allow local authorities to gain greater freedoms with borrowing. That will aid Thanet with its development of the port of Ramsgate, but it will be up to the local authority to manage its financial business using that new freedom. It will be able to determine how much money it can afford to borrow, and it will, of course, manage the debt.
	My hon. Friend has heard of that as the new prudential style of borrowing. Under the proposed legislation, the Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State may also regulate how the new powers may be performed. Those are seen as safeguards for the authority. The powers can relate directly to ports, and where the port is commercially viable the authority will be able to borrow over the limit of current Government support for capital programmes. Where the port is not commercially viable, there will still be the avenue of grants.
	My hon. Friend also raised municipal seaport regulations and support, setting out how other European ports appear to have greater backing from their Governments. A European Commission paper on public funding and state aid in ports is due shortly, and I understand that it aims to clarify the position in more detail. I look forward to it with interest. We continue to work to persuade the Commission and other member states of the need for a level playing field across Europe, which my hon. Friend realises is important to him and to the ports in his area.
	The work on the proposed study of municipal ports has, I am afraid, been delayed for some time owing to the necessary temporary reallocation of staff caused by 11 September, but the aim is that it will be undertaken as soon as possible this year. I can reassure my hon. Friend that the review is important to the Government.
	The potential of the port of Ramsgate has been greatly aided by the opening of the Ramsgate harbour approach road. The scheme, which takes freight lorries and port traffic from the town centre directly to the port, was completed in 2000 at a cost of #30 million. It has improved port access and removed a major impediment to the development of the port and the marina.
	I am indebted to my hon. Friend for reminding me that I opened the new apron and taxiway at Manston airport on what I recall as an extremely hot day last year. I was made very much aware that the owners of Manston have indeed put considerable resources into developing the airport and the related business park.
	I understand that there are also proposals for a new passenger terminal at the airport. My hon. Friend will be aware that we are consulting on the development of airports across the south-east of England; indeed, I am sure that that has not evaded his notice. We expect the consultation to continue into the summer, and the aviation White Paper is likely to follow in the autumn. I am sure that he will contribute to the consultation exercise, as will those others with an interest in Manston airport, and I can assure him that we shall consider the case thoroughly, although he would be surprised if I made any particular comment on it tonight.
	On rail services, I know that my hon. Friend met the Minister for Transport last week. The Strategic Rail Authority has been remitted by the Government to achieve train services that will create a strong intercontinental link to increase trade and tourism in Britain. Because the level of infrastructure required will impact heavily on Kent, a provision was made to allow domestic services in Kent to operate using the channel tunnel rail link. The difficulty is the way in which those services will link into the other railway lines already operating in Kent—the north Kent line and the east Kent line. The Strategic Rail Authority has undertaken an analysis of the options for providing services using the channel tunnel rail link and the way in which they can be delivered. That analysis included taking on board issues such as connecting to already existing tracks, the type of rolling stock required to operate on the different tracks, the difficulty of harmonising signalling and the cost to the train operators of services lost because of overcapacity. I hope my hon. Friend appreciates the complexities and difficulties that that has entailed.
	My hon. Friend proposed that the maintenance and storage of the channel tunnel rail link domestic stock be carried out at Ramsgate. The franchise for the full Kent domestic services will run from 2007, and all prospective tenderers will look at the resources available to them to make the most competitive tender. The siting of a train manufacturer with maintenance facilities at Ramsgate would seem to be an attractive package. My hon. Friend has made representations tonight, and I am sure that he is promoting the facilities at Ramsgate to all the potential franchisees. Once the consultations on the options identified in the SRA report have been completed, it will be for Ministers to examine all aspects and effects that they may have on the areas concerned, particularly the wider benefits for regeneration, employment and liveability in the area—I know that those are important issues for my hon. Friend. I can assure him that any decision on the channel tunnel rail link consultation will take into consideration all the factors that I have outlined.
	My hon. Friend also mentioned the current services to his constituency provided by Connex, presenting them in his usual quiet but robust way. The present deal allows Connex to provide a level of stability to its customers. The package incorporates continuing measures to improve performance and secures commitment to the removal of mark 1 slam-door trains. Connex has already ordered 500 new vehicles to fulfil its commitment to replace that ageing rolling stock. My hon. Friend has the look of someone saying XWatch this space." I am sure that he will do so, and will inform us if that commitment is not met in the expected time scale. The shortened franchise will enable the SRA to market a new integrated Kent franchise from 2007, making use of the new high-speed channel tunnel rail link. As is normally the case, the bidding process for that franchise will be an open competition.
	I have already set out in general terms the support for the funding of local authority schemes through the local transport plan. Phase 1 of the east Kent access scheme has already received provisional approval, and funding has been set aside this year in readiness for the scheme achieving full approval. The next two phases have now been combined, and we are expecting a bid for that part of the scheme in this year's annual progress report.
	I hope that in the time available to me I have been able to cover the points made by my hon. Friend. If there are matters that I have not covered, I am sure that he will point them out to me, and we can deal with them in correspondence.
	I pay tribute to my hon. Friend not only for the way in which he has presented his case tonight but for the way in which he has conducted himself for a number of years in presenting most forcefully in the House matters of interest to his constituents. I commend him strongly for all the good work that he has done.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Adjourned accordingly at six minutes to Eleven o'clock.